Favorite Quotes

Sin comes when we take a perfectly natural desire or longing or ambition and try desperately to fulfill it without God. Not only is it sin, it is a perverse distortion of the image of the Creator in us. All these good things, and all our security are rightly found only and completely in Him.
-Augustine

Only he who believes is obedient; only he who is obedient believes.
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
-Deitrich Bonhoeffer

When I worship, I would rather my heart be without words than my words without heart.
-Lamar Boschman

Jesus promised his disciples three things-that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.
-G.K. Chesterton

It is not what we do that matters, but what a sovereign God chooses to do through us.
-Charles Colson

The very nature of the obedience He demands is that it be given without regard to circumstances or results.
-Charles Colson

The beautiful thing about writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time--unlike, say, brain surgery.
-Robert Cormier

The only difference between a madman and me is that I am not mad.
-Salvador Dali

I believe God wants us to come and worship just the way we are, though when true worship happens we don't stay the way we are.
-Brian Doerkson

A man needs a much bigger orbit than a woman. He needs a mission, a life purpose, and he needs to know his name. Only then is he fit for a woman, for only then does he have something to invite her into.
-John Eldredge

I was wishing that my wishes were what God wished, and if my wishes were not what God wished, I wished that I could wish that my wishes would go away, but the wishes were still there.
-Elizabeth Elliot

Wherever you are, be all there. Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God.
-Jim Elliot

'He makes His ministers a flame of fire.' Am I ignitable? God deliver me from the dread asbestos of 'other things.' Saturate me with the oil of the Spirit that I may be a flame. But flame is transient, often short lived. Canst though bear this, my soul--short life? 'Make me Thy Fuel, Flame of God.'
-Jim Elliot

We are so utterly ordinary, so commonplace, while we profess to know a Power the Twentieth Century does not reckon with. But we are “harmless,” and therefore unharmed. We are spiritual pacifists, non-militants, conscientious objectors in this battle-to-the-death with principalities and powers in high places. Meekness must be had for contact with men, but brass, outspoken boldness is required to take part in the comradeship of the Cross. We are “sideliners” –coaching and criticizing the real wrestlers while content to sit by and leave the enemies of God unchallenged. The world cannot hate us, we are too much like its own. Oh that God would make us dangerous!
-Jim Elliot

You wonder why people choose fields away from the States when young people at home are drifting because no one wants to take time to listen to their problems. I’ll tell you why I left. Because those stateside young people have every opportunity to study, hear, and understand the Word of God in their own language, and these Indians have no opportunity whatsoever. I have had to make a cross of two logs, and lie down on it, to show the Indians what it means to crucify a man. When there is that much ignorance over here and so much knowledge and opportunity over there, I have no question in my mind why God sent me here. Those whimpering stateside young people will wake up on the Day of Judgment condemned to worse fates than these demon-fearing Indians, because having a Bible, they were bored with it---while these never heard of such a thing as writing.
-Jim Elliot

Father, make of me a crisis man. Bring those I contact to decision. Let me not be a milepost on a single road; make me a fork, that men must turn one way or another on facing Christ in me.
-Jim Elliot

How well I see now that He is wanting to do something in me! So many missionaries, intent on doing something, forget that His main work is to make something of them, not just to do a work by their stiff and bungling fingers. Teach me, Lord Jesus, to live simply and love purely, like a child, and to know that You are unchanged in Your attitudes and actions toward me. Give me not to be hungering for the strange, rare and peculiar when the common, ordinary, and regular---rightly taken---will suffice to feed and satisfy the soul. Bring struggle when I need it; take away ease at Your pleasure.
-Jim Elliot

Oh, the awful emptiness of a full life when Christ stands yet without!
-Jim Elliot

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
-Jim Elliot

That saint who advances on his knees never retreats.
-Jim Elliot

Live as though Christ died yesterday, rose from the dead today, and is coming back tomorrow.
-Theodore Epp

If you teach or preach one step beyond where you are living, it is at that point you lose the power and anointing of God.
-Del Fehsenfeld

Ruth Graham, Billy Graham’s wife, was once asked whether she and Dr. Graham ever disagreed. She replied, “Of course we do. If we didn’t, one of us would be unnecessary.”
-Ruth Graham

As part of Christ’s army, you march in the ranks of gallant spirits. Every one of your fellow soldiers is the child of a King. Some, like you, are in the midst of battle, besieged on every side by affliction and temptation. Others, after many assaults, repulses, and rallyings of their faith, are already standing upon the wall of heaven as conquerors. From there they look down and urge you, their comrades on earth, to march up the hill after them. This is their cry: “Fight to the death and the City is your own, as now it is ours!”
-William Gurnall

We have become too enemy-conscious, and can over-do the spiritual warfare aspect of intercession. We need to be more God-conscious, so that we can laugh the laugh of faith knowing that we have power over all the power of the enemy (Luke 10:19). He has already lost control because of Calvary where the Lamb was slain. What confidence and rest of heart this gives us as we face a world in turmoil and such spiritual need.
-Patrick Johnstone

The rule for us all is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
-C.S. Lewis

A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on himself. He himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.
-C. S. Lewis

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic-on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg-or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.
-C.S. Lewis

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.
-C.S. Lewis

Your greatest need is not a spouse. Your greatest need is to be delivered from the wrath of God-and that has already been accomplished for you through the death and resurrection of Christ. So why doubt that God will provide a much, much lesser need? Trust His Sovereignty, trust His Wisdom, trust His Love.
-C.J. Mahaney

The single greatest cause of Atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, but walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.
-Brennan Manning

Real love is always fated. It has been arranged before time. It is the most meticulously prepared of coincidences. And fate, of course, is simply a secular term for the will of God, and coincidence for His Grace.
-Mike Mason

Life is a dance toward God. And the dance is not so graceful as we might think. For while we glide and swing our practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes, and scuffs our shoes. He lowers His head, whispers soft and confident, "You will dance to the beat of 'Amazing Grace' or you will not dance at all." So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a taxing dance to learn. But once learned, don't we glide. And don't we sway. And don't we bury our head in His chest. And don't we love to dance.
-Don Miller

How many there are … who imagine that because Jesus paid it all, they need pay nothing, forgetting that the prime object of their salvation was that they should follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ in bringing back a lost world to God.
-Lottie Moon

When a man comes to the mountains, he comes home.
-John Muir

Living daily in an effort to glorify God in everything we do is worship. Worshiping through song is simply the overflow of a worshiping life and heart, so that what comes from the lips is true authentic praise and surrender to God.
-Lane Oliver

The Christian religion, then, teaches men these two truths; that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him. It is equally important to men to know both these points; and it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his own wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can free him from it.
-Blaise Pascal

God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
-John Piper

Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.
-Will Rogers

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly...who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known neither victory nor defeat.
-Theodore Roosevelt

Example is not the main thing in influencing others…it is the only thing.
-Albert Schweitzer


The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so.
-Henry Wheeler Shaw

If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We yearn to believe that in some way we are important. This inner drive is as intense as our need for water and oxygen.
-R.C. Sproul

The highest of missionary motives is neither obedience to the Great Commission (important as that is), nor love for sinners who are alienated and perishing (strong as that incentive is, especially when we contemplate the wrath of God…), but rather zeal-burning and passionate zeal-for the glory of Jesus Christ…Only one imperialism is Christian…and that is concern for His Imperial Majesty Jesus Christ, and for the glory of his empire.
-John Stott

We should be ‘jealous’…for the honour of his name-troubled when it remains unknown, hurt when it is ignored, indignant when it is blasphemed. And all the time anxious and determined that it shall be given the honor and glory which are due to it.
-John Stott

What people do is only the outward result of how they manage the forces that flow deep within them. This is why Jesus had so much to say about the heart, and why He was so unsparing in dealing with people who put up a good outward show of righteousness while their hearts were corrupt. If we are going to be authentic Christians, we have to see the absolute necessity of aligning our inner drives with God’s purposes.
-Joseph M. Stowell

Our need for significance is not the culprit. We were built for significance. The culprit is our struggling, stumbling attempts to manufacture our own sense of significance and in the process place at risk the that very thing for which we strive, the very people we need and love, the society in which we move, and the cause of Christ for which we have been redeemed.
-Joseph M. Stowell

Some may wish to live within the sound of church and chapel bell; I want to run a rescue shack within a yard of hell.
-L.T. Studd

I shall not truly live until I see God; when I have seen God, I shall never die.
-Mabel Boggs Sweet

To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.
-A.W. Tozer

We are often hindered from giving up our treasures to the Lord out of fear for their safety; this is especially true when those treasures are loved relatives and friends. But we need have no such fears. Our Lord came not to destroy but to save. Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not so committed.
-A.W. Tozer

The Christian life is not about closing our eyes and pretending Jesus turns all of our lemons into lemonade, and worship music should never be about helping us live out of touch with reality.
-Kevin Twit

Rather than flatter ourselves, we can embrace the reality that we come to God from "bondage, sorrow and night" and yet thrill to the fact that still He invites us to come! The Gospel is the great surprise that stirs us to "love and sing and wonder" because the Lord who bought us "pitied us when enemies" and in His death at the cross "grace and justice, join and point to mercy's store." All the wrath due His people was poured out on Jesus and so "when through grace in Christ our trust is, justice smiles and asks no more!"
-Kevin Twit

Whisper my name and woo my eyes; Say your sweet little lies; Lay me down; convince me that I can't stand; Wasting time, you're talking to a dead man. Scream in my ear to stir my sleep; Say I'm feeble, say I'm weak; Tear me apart or trip me where I stand; Wasting time, you're talking to a dead man.
-The Waiting

All men die. Few men ever really live.
-William Wallace

If thy heart be as my heart, give me thy hand.
-John Wesley

Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
Westminster’s Shorter Catechism

Do you want to die in your La-Z-Boy watching TV or do you want to go with your boots on doing something for the Lord?
-Steve Wiggins

There comes a time in every boy’s life when he must realize the fact that though girls are evil and have excessive amounts of cooties, they're the only way to get a good back rub for free.
-Anonymous

Never pass up an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.
-Anonymous

A closed mouth gathers no foot.
-Anonymous

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love the Lord time is not.
-Anonymous