Quotes by Pastors - Page 30

Paul Ricoeur has wonderful counsel for people like us. Go ahead, he says, maintain and practice your hermaneutics of suspicion. It is important to do this. Not only important, it is necessary. There are a lot of lies out there; learn to discern the truth and throw out the junk. But then reenter the book, the world, with what he calls 'a second naivete'.' Look at the world with childlike wonder, ready to be startled into surprised delight by the profuse abundance of truth and beauty and goodness that is spilling out of the skies at every moment. Cultivate a hermaneutic of adoration - see how large, how splendid, how magnificent life is.And then practice this hermaneutic of adoration in the reading of Holy Scripture. Plan on spending the rest of our lives exploring and enjoying the world both vast and intricate that is revealed by this text.
Eugene H. Peterson
David cuts through all the many needs, wants, and desires that may have been bouncing around inside him and essentially says, "If I could have only one thing, I want to be with God, to be in His presence, to know that he is always with me." Whether in good times or bad times, David knew the thing he needed most: to feel God's presence close by, intimately, through worship.
Craig Groeschel
Work becomes worship when you dedicate it to God and perform it with an awareness of his presence.
Rick Warren
We can worship God imperfectly, but we cannot worship him insincerely.
Rick Warren
Real worship costs.
Rick Warren
It is not always convenient or comfortable, and sometimes worship is a sheer act of the will--a willing sacrifice.
Rick Warren
When you committed your life to Christ, he moved into the center; but you must keep him there through worship.
Rick Warren
Becoming an object of worship is to serve God for what you can get from him
Sunday Adelaja
The filling of the Holy Spirit brings a sharp separation between the believer and the world.Actually, after Pentecost, they were looking at another world. They really saw another world.Nowadays, we perceive that even a large part of evangelical Christianity is trying to convert this world to the church. We are bringing the world in head over heels--unregenerated, uncleansed, unshriven, unbaptized, unsanctified. we are bringing the world right into the church. If we can get some big shot to say something nice about the church, we rush into print and tell about this fellow and what nice things he said. I don't care at all about big shots because I serve a living Saviour, and Jesus Christ is Lord of lords and King of kings. I believe every man ought to know this ability to see another world.
A.W. Tozer
Human beings by their very nature are worshipers. Worship is not something we do; it defines who we are. You cannot divide human beings into those who worship and those who don’t. Everybody worships; it’s just a matter of what, or whom, we serve.
Paul David Tripp
Think of (the Kingdom) like the sun. As it peeks through on a cloudy day, we do not say the sun has grown. We say, 'The sun has broken through.' Our view of the sun has changed, or obstacles to the sun have been removed, but we have not changed the sun.
Kevin DeYoung
If you want your ministry to have ‘it’, more important than anything else we’ve discussed, you must have ‘it’. When it has filtered through your heart - the rare combination of passion, integrity, focus, faith, expectation, drive, hunger, and God’s anointing - God tends to infuse your ministry with ‘it’. He blesses your work. People are changed. Leaders grow. Resources flow. The ministry seems to take on a life of its own.
Craig Groeschel
The Church acts as a sort of embassy for the government of the King. It is an outpost of the Kingdom of God surrounded by the kingdom of darkness. Just as an embassy is meant to showcase the life of a nation to the surrounding people, so the Church is meant to manifest the life of the Kingdom of God to the people around it.
Kevin DeYoung
Let God Himself be the main attraction at church again, and let us be tireless in our insistence that church is for God, about God, through God, and to the glory of His great Son.
James MacDonald
The entity God created to traffic His transcendence has fallen far from its mission when it chooses instead to traffic what can be found on any street corner or at the local mall. You may ask, "But how has the church done that?" * By offering secularists what they find mildly interesting and calling it church.*By submitting to self-help sermons where encounter with God is not even on the agenda.* By letting the horizontal excellence of the show stand in for Vertical impact.*By substituting the surprise or shock of superficial entertainment for the supernatural.Church was designed to deliver what we were created to long for. Church must again be about a Vertical encounter that interrupts and alters everything.
James MacDonald
Church leaders raised on rationalism lead ministries where the supernatural, the Vertical, is suppressed and where God Himself is at best an observer and certainly seldom, if ever, and obvious participant in church.
James MacDonald
In a society where rationality has ruled so long, the church frequently fails to see that in forsaking the weekly pursuit of the transcendent, we have given up the only ground that was uniquely ours in this world. In attempting to make the church something that can attract and add value to secular mind-sets, we have turned our backs on our one true proposition - transcendence.
James MacDonald
As a leader it is your job to protect the missional integrity of the Jesus gathering to which you have been called. It is your responsibility to see to it that the church under your care continues as a gathering of people in process; a place where the curious,the unconvinced, the sceptical, the used-to-believe and the broken, as well as the committed, informed and sold-out come together around Peter's declaration that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.
Andy Stanley
A materialistic world will not be won to Christ by a materialistic church.
David Platt
If outside forces and culture were the reasons behind declining and non-influential churches, we would likely have no churches today. The greatest periods of growth, particularly the first-century growth, took place in adversarial cultures. We are not hindered by external forces; we are hindered by our own lack of commitment and selflessness.
Thom S. Rainer
Somewhere along the line, "Church" became a weekly event rather than a gathering of people who did life together.
Todd Stocker
Worship gatherings are not always spectacular, but they are always supernatural. And if a church looks for or works for the spectacular, she may miss the supernatural. If a person enters a gathering to be wowed with something impressive, with a style that fits him just right, with an order of service and song selection designed just the right way, that person may miss the supernatural presence of God. Worship is supernatural whenever people come hungry to respond, react, and receive from God for who He is and what He has done. A church worshipping as a Creature of the Word doesn't show up to perform or be entertained; she comes desperate and needy, thirsty for grace, receiving from the Lord and the body of Christ, and then gratefully receiving what she needs as she offers her praise-the only proper response to the God who saves us.
Matt Chandler
Hard by the church stood the public house; so often the two are closely conjoined, honorably sharing both joys and sorrows.
Jeremias Gotthelf
An institution theoretically devoted to providing comfort to those in need (the church) is in trouble because it has embraced the same pressure cooker we find everywhere else.
Tullian Tchividjian
Here then are the choices we all face moment by moment: Will we aim to be impressive? Will we expect to be in complete control? Will we ensure that we always come out on top as winners? Or will we be happy for the power of Christ to rest upon us in our endless weakness? 'No man can give at once the impressions that he himself is clever and that Jesus Christ is mighty to save.' Neither can any church.
Raymond C. Ortlund Jr.
...ask yourself, "Who's getting the glory in this ministry?" You see, if we do ministry OUR way, it won't be for His glory, because our ways are not His ways.
Charles R. Swindoll
Without vision, a church devolves into a lukewarm, aimless organization characterized by infighting, budget grabbing and a dead heart for the lost.
Todd Stocker
I cannot at the same time accept the glory and give God the glory... Glorifying God means being occupied with and committed to His ways rather than preoccupied with and determined my own way. It is being so thrilled with Him, so devoted to Him, so committed to Him that we cannot get enough of Him!
Charles R. Swindoll
If you life is an example of glorifying God, others won't see your good works and glorify YOU, because they'll know what you are doing is for God's glory.
Charles R. Swindoll
Believe me, once you have tasted worship—the kind of worship that captures your heart and rivets your full attention on the living Lord—nothing less satisfies. Nothing else even comes close. Once you have tasted true worship, you will never want to play church again.
Charles R. Swindoll
If your motive is in any way to promote greatness for yourself, you're in the wrong calling.
Charles R. Swindoll
Like the hub of a wheel, the church’s corporate life is an extension of the good news that God was in Christ reconciling the whole world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.
Harold L. Senkbeil
Somehow we American pastors, without really noticing what was happening, got our vocations redefined in the terms of American careerism. We quit thinking of the parish as a location for pastoral spirituality and started thinking of it as an opportunity for advancement. Tarshish, not Nineveh, was the destination. The moment we did that, we started thinking wrongly, for the vocation of pastor has to do with living out the implications of the word of God in community, not sailing off into the exotic seas of religion in search of fame and fortune.
Eugene H. Peterson
There is a long and well-documented tradition of wisdom in the Christian faith that any venture into leadership, whether by laity or clergy, is hazardous. it is necessary that there be leaders, but woe to those who become leaders.
Eugene H. Peterson
Deception is nowhere more common than in religion. And the persons most easily and damningly deceived are the leaders. Those who deceive others are first themselves deceived, for not many, I think, begin with evil intent. The devil, after all, is a spiritual being. His usual mode of temptation is not an obvious evil but to an apparent good. The commonest forms of devil-inspired worship do not take place furtively at black masses with decapitated cats but flourish under the bright lights of acclaim and glory, in a swirl of organ music.
Eugene H. Peterson
Pastors enter congregations vocationally in order to embrace the totality of human life in Jesus' name. We are convinced there is no detail, however unpromising, in people's lives in which Christ may not work his will. Pastors agree to stay with the people in their communities week in and week out, year in and year out, to proclaim and guide, encourage and instruct as God work his purposes (gloriously, it will eventually turn out) in the meandering and disturbingly inconstant lives of our congregations.This necessarily means taking seriously, and in faith, the dull routines, the empty boredom, and the unattractive responsibilities that make up much of most people's lives. It means witnessing to the transcendent in the fog and rain. It means living hopefully among people who from time to time get flickering glimpses of the Glory but then live through stretches, sometimes long ones, of unaccountable grayness. Most pastor work takes place in obscurity: deciphering grace in the shadows, searching out meaning in a difficult text, blowing on the embers of a hard-used life. This is hard work and not conspicuously glamorous.
Eugene H. Peterson
It is time to revive and recover the third article of the Creed; to live corporately and communally in a world of expressive individualism. . . . We need to show how the Holy Spirit calls, gathers, enlightens and sanctifies people one by one through the gospel, and then draws them into communion in his holy church.
Harold L. Senkbeil
If the good news is an invitation to a Jesus way of life and not information about somebody who accomplished something on my behalf, I’m sunk. This is law and no gospel.
Kevin DeYoung
Keep at it! Remember marketing is building a relationship! If you use marketing for a year and stop, you cut off your relationship with the larger community. Then you will have to re-start the relationship all over again. The old adage “it takes six to stick” is proven true over and over again. I realized this in year three of our church plant. I think of the hundreds of people that came to our services that had no connection with me or our people because we were willing to build a sustained relationship with them through marketing.
Gary Rohrmayer
Why does it seem that the church is more interested in people involvement rather than people engagement.
Todd Stocker
People should see genuine, authentic love in the church
Sunday Adelaja
But just as quantity wins respect and honour for a church, it is quality that provides a church with safety and protection.
Sunday Adelaja
You have to work at having quality in your church, because people that are influential in your city may be God’s instruments for resolving all kinds of problems that will most surely come up in the future.
Sunday Adelaja
The person who has no deputies or assistants has no future.
Sunday Adelaja
The church is God's remnant in a country, able to change the life of the nation
Sunday Adelaja
The church needs to raise up the Moses’ and last days deliverers.
Sunday Adelaja
The civil involvement of the church is a spiritual tactic aim at defeating the forces of darkness.
Sunday Adelaja
Missional leaders understand the power of connecting relationally in their community through personal networking.
Gary Rohrmayer
The secret of real prosperity in the church is to teach God’s people principles of economic empowerment
Sunday Adelaja
The gospel that has been preached in our churches has not been fair to the African continent. It has left us in a beggarly state, waiting on God for things we could produce by and for ourselves.
Sunday Adelaja
We have come to love darkness in the church rather than finding God in creation.
Sunday Adelaja
Money does not go only to those who go to church, it goes to those who know and comply with the laws of money
Sunday Adelaja
Church must lead all other spheres of influence.We find people from all the mountains there.The church leaders must be able to mentor them
Paul Gitwaza
Church leaders may get disappointed in ministry if they do not know God’s time.
Sunday Adelaja
If you want to have a well-ordered church, then you have to become well-ordered yourself.
Sunday Adelaja
Another purpose for speaking in tongues is the edification of the church.
Sunday Adelaja
Only the church can provide people with quality fellowship
Sunday Adelaja
Here is where most preachers make their mistake. They are afraid that by preaching the gospel too clearly, it will be their fault if people lapse into sin. They imagine that the gospel is food for the carnal-minded. True enough, to many the gospel does become the smell of death unto death, but that is not the fault of the Gospel. That happens only because men do not accept -do not believe-the Gospel. Faith is not merely thinking, "I believe." Your whole heart must be seized by the gospel and come to rest in it. When that happens, you are transformed and cannot help but love and serve God.
C.F.W. Walther
In their churches the Protestants taught believers to go out of the four walls of the church to demonstrate their love for God by how they serve fellow humans
Sunday Adelaja
God is trying to tell us that there is a shift taking place in the body of Christ especially in the way we do church
Sunday Adelaja