Meditation: On progress in the spiritual life

All good comes of God, and not of yourself

O, my soul! It may please you when you have taken some step forward in discipline, or patience, or self control, or in some other aspect of righteous intent and action.

But take heed! And remember your many failures and blunders!¹ Right reflection will reveal them to swamp any successes.

All good comes of God, and not of yourself.² Give glory to God and remember Him, and hope in His continued mercy.³

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This post forms part of the Meditations series, the introduction to which is here.

The footnotes below lead to the online version of The Qur’an: A Complete Revelation. It is free to use and is designed to aid students of both the Qur’anic text in English and of the original Arabic. You can download the full work free or purchase it in hardback (at 10% less than with online bookstores).

Commenting subscribers are invited to identify errors in syntax, spelling, in my reference links, or deviations from clear sense — as well as to suggest additional references.

In either case, they are asked to include the excerpt from my text their input relates to, and in the case of suggested additional references to link to them using the copy link function from the dropdown feature found at each verse here.

1. 3:103, 3:152-153, 4:49, 4:113, 24:21, 93:1-11. 

2. 4:79, 16:53.

3. 2:64, 2:105, 3:74, 4:83, 4:113, 10:58, 17:57, 18:16, 24:10, 24:14, 24:21, 28:73, 30:46, 39:38, 42:8, 45:30, 57:28, 76:31.