Randy Alcorn Quotes

What you do with your resources in this life is your autobiography.

By eroding their sense of shame we've made immorality normal, not only in the world but also in the forbidden squadron. ...their new Christian friends recommended some of the movies Fletcher had been wondering if he should now avoid. I was delighted one of them said, "This is a great movie--only one sex scene, and the f-word's only used a few times." 'Titanic' is one of my favorites. How many Christian young people have watched it in their own homes? Think of it, Squaltaint. Suppose someone in the youth group said to the boys, 'There's an attractive girl down the street. Let's get together and go look through her window and watch her undress and lay back on a couch and pose naked from the waist up. Then this girl and her boyfriend will get in a car and have sex--let's get as close as we can and listen to them and watch the windows steam up.' The strategy would never work. They'd know immediately it was wrong. But you can get them to do exactly the same thing by using a television instead of a window. That's all is takes! Think of it, Squaltaint. Every day Christians across the country, including many squadron leaders, watch women and men undress and commit acts of fornication and adultery the Enemy calls an abomination.We've made them a bunch of voyeurs! Churches full of peeping toms.

Randy Alcorn

To procrastinate obedience is to disobey God.

Randy Alcorn

it's my responsibility to cultivate the man in my son. I can't be passive about that.

Randy Alcorn

I feel like a child who has found a wonderful trail in the woods. Countless others have gone before and blazed the trail, but to the child it's as new and fresh as if it had never been walked before. The child is invariably anxious for others to join in the great adventure. It's something that can only be understood by actual experience. Those who've begun the journey, and certainly those who've gone further than I, will readily understand what I am saying.

Randy Alcorn

Worry is momentary atheism crying out for correction by trust in a good, sovereign God. Suffering breaks self-reliance.

Randy Alcorn

Too often we assume that God has increased our income to increase our standard of living, when his stated purpose is to increase our standard of giving. (Look again at 2 Corinthians 8:14 and 9:11).

Randy Alcorn

..tithing isn't something I do to clear my conscience so I can do whatever I want with the 90 percent--it also belongs to God! I must seek his direction and permission for whatever I do with the full amount. I may discover that God has different ideas than I do.

Randy Alcorn

It's curious that the Church has become the most tightfisted at the very time in history when God has provided most generously. There's considerable talk about the end of the age, and many people seem to believe that Christ will return in their lifetime. But why is it that expecting Christ's return hasn't radically influenced our giving? Why is it that people who believe in the soon return of Christ are so quick to build their own financial empires--which prophecy tells us will perish--and so slow to build God's kingdom?

Randy Alcorn

Given our abundance, the burden of proof should always be on keeping, not giving. Why would you not give? We err by beginning with the assumption that we should keep or spend the money God entrusts to us. Giving should be the default choice. Unless there is a compelling reason to spend it or keep it, we should give it.

Randy Alcorn

God prospers me not to raise my standard of living, but to raise my standard of giving.

Randy Alcorn

Parents who spoil their children out of 'love' should realize that they are performing acts of child abuse. Although there are no laws against such abuse--no man-made laws anyway--this spiritual mistreatment may result in as much long-term personal and social damage as the worst physical abuse.

Randy Alcorn

...if I try to make only enough money for my family' immediate needs, it may violate Scripture. ...Even though earning just enough to meet the needs of my family may seem nonmaterialistic, it's actually selfish when I could earn enough to care for others as well.

Randy Alcorn

Some take pains to be biblical, but many [Christian financial teachers, writers, investment counselors, and seminar leaders] simply parrot their secular colleagues. Other than beginning and ending with prayer, mentioning Christ, and sprinkling in some Bible verses, there's no fundamental difference. They reinforce people's materialist attitudes and lifestyles. They suggest a variety of profitable plans in which people can spend or stockpile the bulk of their resources. In short, to borrow a term from Jesus, some Christian financial experts are helping people to be the most successful 'rich fools' they can be.

Randy Alcorn

Imagine you're alive at the end of the Civil War. You're living in the South, but you're a Northerner. You plan to move home as soon as the war's over. While in the South you've accumulated lots of Confederate currency. Now, suppose you know for a fact the North's going to win the war, and the end is imminent. What will you do with your Confederate money? If you're smart, there's only one answer. You should immediately cash in your Confederate currency for U. S. currency - the only money that will have value once the war's over. Keep only enough Confederate currency to meet your short-term needs. Kingdom currency, backed by the eternal treasury, is the only medium of exchange recognized by the Son of God, whose government will last forever. The currency of his kingdom is our present faithful service and sacrificial use of our resources for him. The payoff in eternity will be what Paul called 'a firm foundation' consisting of treasures beyond our wildest dreams.

Randy Alcorn

Jesus' miracles provide us with a sample of the meaning of redemption: a freeing of creation from the shackles of sin and evil and a reinstatement of creaturely living as intended by God.

Randy Alcorn

Someday this upside-down world will be turned right side up. Nothing in all eternity will turn it back again. If we are wise, we will use our brief lives on earth positioning ourselves for the turn.

Randy Alcorn

Many [Western Christians] habitually think and act as if there is no eternity. . . . We major in the momentary and minor in the momentous.

Randy Alcorn

Whenever we have excess, giving should be our natural response. It should be the automatic decision, the obvious thing to do in light of Scripture and human need.

Randy Alcorn

We should remember Christ's words, 'Let nothing be wasted,' when we look in our refrigerators and garbage cans and garages.

Randy Alcorn

Giving up everything must mean giving over everything to kingdom purposes, surrendering everything to further the one central cause, loosening our grip on everything. For some of us, this may mean ridding ourselves of most of our possessions. But for all of us it should mean dedicating everything we retain to further the kingdom. (For true disciples, however, it cannot mean hoarding or using kingdom assets self-indulgently.)

Randy Alcorn

Yanked out of the present, Adam discovered the richness of the past in people's stories.

Randy Alcorn

We are all theologians, either good ones or bad ones. I'd rather be a good one. Wouldn't you?

Randy Alcorn

He opened the first letter, No "Dear Mr. Woods." It was a page full of profanities. There was something oddly refreshing about honest, to-the-point hate mail. No hypocrisy and forced politeness. Too many letters ripped you to shreds, then closed off 'Sincerely yours.

Randy Alcorn

Lord Foulgrin: "You must not let him see Charis as a place of learning, exploration, duties, travel, companionship, banquets, celebrations, and productive work. A low view of heaven is our ace in the hole." (conspiring to bring Fletcher down after salvation)

Randy Alcorn

The most tragic strain in human existence lies in the fact that the pleasure which we find in the things of this life, however good that pleasure may be in itself, is always taken away from us. The things for which men strive hardly ever turn out to be as satisfying as they expected, and in the rare cases in which they do, sooner or later they are snatched away.... For the Christians, all those partial, broken and fleeting perfections which he glimpses in the world around him, which wither in his grasp and he snatches away from him even while the wither, are found again, perfect, complete and lasting in the absolute beauty of God.

Randy Alcorn

For the Christian, death is not the end of adventure but a doorway from a wold where dreams and adventures shrink, to a world where dreams and adventures forever expand.

Randy Alcorn

If you're a child of God, you do not just "go around once" on Earth. You don't get just one earthly life. You get another-one far better and without end. You'll inhabit the New Earth! You'll live with the God you cherish and the people you love as an undying person on an undying Earth.

Randy Alcorn

Every kingdom work, whether publicly performed or privately endeavored, partakes of the kingdom's imperishable character. Every honest intention, every stumbling word of witness, every resistance of temptation, every motion of repentance, every gesture of concern, every routine engagement, every motion of worship, every struggle towards obedience, every mumbled prayer, everything, literally, which flows out of our faith-relationship with the Ever-Living One, will find its place in the ever-living heavenly order which will dawn at his coming.

Randy Alcorn

Because satan hates us, he's determined to rob us of the joy we'd have if we believed what God tells us about the magnificent world to come.

Randy Alcorn

She was home (in Heaven). She was with the Person she was made for, in the place that was made for her.

Randy Alcorn

If Miss Watson had told Huck what the Bible says about living in a resurrected body and being with people we love on a resurrected Earth with gardens and rivers and mountains and untold adventures--now that would have gotten his attention.

Randy Alcorn

Unless we learn how to humbly tell each other our giving stories, our churches will not learn to give.

Randy Alcorn

Good-hearted laughter is a tribute to the happy God, who created laughter and delights to enter into it with us.

Randy Alcorn

We can't surrender to the culture. We've minimized the role of fathers, so we've created a generation of barbarians, children who become men without growing up. They stay in boyhood through their 20s and 30s, sometimes their whole lives. They think of themselves first, indulge in pornography, do what they feel like, leave their wives, and culture, and churches to raise their children.

Randy Alcorn

Christians are God's delivery people, through whom he does his giving to a needy world. We are conduits of God's grace to others. Our eternal investment portfolio should be full of the most strategic kingdom-building projects to which we can disburse God's funds.

Randy Alcorn