Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 12

The greatest men stand on their values and pray on their knees.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Why in the world have we never found what we’re really looking for? Because what we need is often the very thing we won’t accept. And sadly, in turning away the God we need, we need to understand that we have chosen to live without everything we need.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Is my faith so terribly pathetic that I have diminished God to the point that I doubt His ability to survive in the very world that He came to save? Indeed, I have done exactly that. And all I need to do to beat that mentality is to remember that a baby born in a manger with every disadvantage imaginable stills lives today.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The worst defeat of all is to surrender without having been defeated. And it is Christmas that obliterates both.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To grasp love, I must grasp the fact that it is a creation of God and therefore it is forever beyond me. But the very fact that it is forever beyond me is the very thing that prompts me to forever pursue it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If my decisions constantly heed the voice of the world, I can be completely assured that I’m going to end up in a ‘world of hurt.’ If my decisions heed the word of God, I can be completely assured that this ‘world of hurt’ isn’t anywhere near my solar system.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Although it pains me, I must admit that I have never found what I ‘need.’ And I am in this place because long ago I took it upon myself to decide what I ‘want’ to need, verses surrendering to what I ‘need’ to need. And thankfully I have realized that God made Christmas everything that I ‘want,’ but more so He made it everything that I ‘need.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In the thoughtlessness of my incessant hurry, I have made God an ‘addendum in’ my life verses the ‘agenda of’ my life. And what I need to hurry up and realize is that with these priorities positioned as such, what I am hurrying to is my own demise.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Despite my incessant desperation, I simply cannot paint the perfect picture within which I would wish to live out my life. And because I cannot, God picked up the brush of love, positioned the canvas of history and painted a manger.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I find that I spend a tremendous amount of time chasing the praises of men rather than sitting with the praises of God. The former is something I attempt to catch, the latter catches me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I huddle in the dark with a mass of burnt matches strewn at my feet. And yet, for all of those matches I’ve not been able to light a single candle. And huddled in such deep darkness, I’ve somehow yet to realize that Christmas made both matches and candles forever obsolete.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The most formidable way to lead is to serve. And while the perplexing oxymoron of such a grinding statement absolutely cripples us, it birthed a Savior.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The voice incessantly quelled in the chorus of human voices will always be the voice of God. And given a reality of this magnitude, I would be well advised to cease my babbling and encourage those around me to do the same.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I have yet to learn that I am not designed to carry the burden of men. Rather, I am designed to carry the love of God so that I might soothe the burden of men.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The sure path to tomorrow was plotted in a manger and paved on a cross. And although this sturdy byway is mine for the taking, I have incessantly chosen lesser paths. And maybe it is time to realize that Christmas is a promise that I can walk through the world and never get lost in the woods.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I can somehow focus on the pain of not focusing on my pain, I will soon find that pain healed simply because I forced myself to do the exact opposite of what my core humanity demanded I do…I sought to heal the pain of someone else instead.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Of course I fall. Yet, I incessantly blame my falls on circumstance so that I can deny my own inadequacy and therefore remain my own god. And so, I am left to ask which will come first, the fall that kills me or the surrender that saves me?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We need to know that our limits do not define our limitations. And an empty tomb does exactly that.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Reasonably speaking, we can see the cross as entirely possible. But in considering Easter, we see an empty tomb as entirely impossible. And is it possible that God had to do the impossible to finally get our attention?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Do I dare believe such an absurdly outrageous story that a man would die, lay lifeless in some tomb for three days and then somehow live again? Yet, if I dare to consider it, is that not exactly what I so desperately desire for this lifeless life of mine? And is Easter God’s tenderly outrageous way of telling me that that is exactly what I can have?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe I don’t have enough beginnings in my life because I fought against the endings that were about to birth those beginnings.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sooner or later I will realize that the very things I most desperately need are the very things I am unable to give myself. Therefore, I will either be left despising the fact that I am doomed to live out a life that is perpetually empty, or I will realize that an empty tomb is the single thing that will eternally fill me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Of course God does outrageous things. But in reality, what insanity would prompt me to follow a God who did anything less?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Easter says that every ending ever experienced by man is exquisitely crafted to find its own ending at the feet of a fresh beginning.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There are an incalculable number of things within me that I frantically wish to be emptied of, and despite my most earnest efforts to remove them, they remain. And it is Easter that reminds me that God empties out tombs.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Although I rail against it, death is the dark demarcation beyond which I am at the mercy of my own end. To the contrary, an empty tomb says that my end is at the mercy of God’s beginning.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am pressed to admit that I don’t have the capacity to understand the bloodied horrors of a cross and the wild exhilaration of an empty tomb. But at the point that I think I completely understand God, I have at that very point humanized Him and in that very action I have lost Him. Therefore, I much prefer to simply marvel.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
God emptied out that first tomb so that He could turn around and empty out me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A god of the ‘possible’ is no God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Easter is the final solution to the finality of death.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My limitations abruptly define the frighteningly negligible extent of my existence, yet my soul utterly perishes if bound by those very same limits. And does this not somehow evidence both the reality of and need for God?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Easter is the invulnerable tale of utter selflessness where at an inestimable cost God did for us what He did not need done for Himself. And that kind of ‘doing’ happens every day.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If God has the answer to every question, maybe my appreciation for God should be shaped more by the number of questions and less by the wisdom of the answers.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Greatness untethered from God results in calamity unrestrained by men.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Words can be honed to crafted perfection by the finest wordsmiths. Yet, if we trust solely in the expanse of them to explain this God of ours or articulate our experience of Him, we will have brutally destroyed the very things we are attempting to explain. And if I should do that, no words can describe how badly I wish I had no words.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I pray for sufficient wisdom to understand that wisdom apart from God is the stuff of opinion tainted by the rot of bias. And if I am somehow apt to confuse such rubbish with wisdom, I will think myself wise but find myself living in a landfill.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Easter is God throwing everything at death so that I can give everything to life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To attempt to know myself ‘apart’ from God is to choose to know nothing more than ‘a part’ of myself.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
God invites. We decline. And because of that single foolhardy decision we spend the rest of our lives ‘declining’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Easter is a time when God turned the inevitability of death into the invincibility of life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In one way or another, every mission that I have ever set out on to rescue myself is yet another mission that I end up needing to be rescued from. Hence, there is God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I were to sit down and count them, how many of my prayers were tainted by the seduction of greed? None, simply because nothing of that sort is a prayer.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe what I need to be rescued from is the feeling that I don’t need to be rescued, for without a doubt this is the most difficult rescue of all.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Raw power without Godly obedience is a long walk off a short conscience.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Our prayers are something akin to delivering a list, verses surrendering a life. The former will always leave me creating the next list, while the latter will leave me creating a new life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
With God, the word ‘impossible’ is itself impossible.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To ascend the mountain, we must descend to our knees.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A father teaches his children that the battle is not determined by the enemy that stands around them, but by the God Who stands within them. And that lesson can only be driven home as they watch their father stand around them, while God stands within their father.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I choose to take the pen from God and write the story of my life without Him, I better have plenty of erasers and a whole lot of white-out. Better yet, I should invest in a good shredder.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sooner or later I will be faced with the fact that the world is helpless to meet my needs. And at that point, I will be left with two conclusions; that life is cruel or God is real.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There’s not much that I can find in places where there is nothing to find. However, to avoid facing God I find myself spending a lot of time in those very places.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Suddenly finding myself imprisoned in the ruins of the fortresses I created, I realize that that which I built to protect me has now become a labyrinth that is set to destroy me. And laying spent in the rubble, I finally realize that there is only one fortress and I cannot create it because there is only one God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If you want to completely destroy a child, all you have to do is mold them into your vision of what you want them to be. If you want to completely liberate a child, all you have to do is grow them into the person they were created to be. The former cannot see God in the child. The latter can see nothing less.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To deny the battle is unwise. To believe that I can fight it without God is insane. To actually do so is suicidal. No wonder so many of us walk around looking like death warmed over.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If the light we have is continually engulfed by the darkness in a way that makes the darkness even darker, maybe we should think about getting our light from Someone else before it gets a whole lot darker.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The best I can do is to ‘pretend’ that I’m my own god. But in the pretending I have to pretend that I’m not pretending, and somehow that doesn’t sound very god-like to me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My heart says, ‘This way.’ The world says, ‘That way.’ God says, ‘I am the Way.’ And if perchance I choose to listen to the first two, I’m going to find myself so far off the ‘way’ that being lost becomes the ‘way’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I had any hand in it at all there’s a chance that it might be beautiful, but it simply cannot not be majestic.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
How often is my tidy and well-appointed world nothing but the thin veneer of an imagination that I’ve chosen to use in the service of denial, rather than a gift I’ve chosen to exercise out of a passion for change?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To pretend is to do nothing more than imagine life as something wonderful so that we don’t have to incur the pain that it takes to actually make life wonderful.
Craig D. Lounsbrough