Quotes by Pastors - Page 51

Confidence is being scared to death but getting the job done anyway.
Todd Stocker
A person who knows spiritual principles will walk confidently in God’s path, to fulfil what God has already planned to do
Sunday Adelaja
Quality brings security and confidence
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To be a mirror of God’s love is to show Jesus by one’s way of living
Sunday Adelaja
Let us remember: when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.
A.W. Tozer
It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply." God actually rises up storms of conflict in relationships at times in order to accomplish that deeper work in our character. We cannot love our enemies in our own strength. This is graduate-level grace. Are you willing to enter this school? Are you willing to take the test? If you pass, you can expect to be elevated to a new level in the Kingdom. For He brings us through these tests as preparation for greater use in the Kingdom. You must pass the test first.
A.W. Tozer
it’s not enough for Christians merely to recognize that the world isn’t what it ought to be and that people are suffering in ways they shouldn’t have to suffer.” Instead, our “sorrow and indignation” should prompt us to act in ways that “subvert” that brokenness.
Ed Stetzer
When you suffer and lose, that does not mean you are being disobedient to God. In fact, it might mean you're right in the center of His will. The path of obedience is often marked by times of suffering and loss.
Charles R. Swindoll
We will never become the people of hope and blessing we're meant to be until we learn how to wake up and pay attention to the glory and pain, beauty and suffering that are in lives all around us.
Richard Dahlstrom
The greatest bloodbaths in the history of the human race were recorded in the twentieth century in countries that sought to eliminate God, worship, and faith.
John Ortberg
The school of suffering never graduates any students, so ask God to teach to you the lessons He wants you to learn.
Warren W. Wiersbe
As I took up life as a minister, I tried to understand why so many people resisted and rejected God, I soon realized that perhaps that main reason was affliction and suffering. ...But at the same time, I learned that just as many people find God through affliction and suffering. They find that adversity moves them toward God rather than away. ...When pain and suffering come upon us, we finally see not only that we are not in control of our lives, but that we never were.
Timothy J. Keller
The answer is that their confidence was actuallh in God, not in their limited understanding of what they thought he would do. They had inner assurance that God would rescue them. However, they were not so arrogant as to be sure they were "reading God right." They knew that God was under no obligation to operate according to their limited wisdom.
Timothy J. Keller
At Gethsemane: "Jesus is subordinating His loudest desires to His deepest desires.
Timothy J. Keller
This passage, by the way, doesn't just give us the comparative negative of hell, but it translates well into a theology of suffering. With these words of Jesus in mind, I can now know that it is better never to hold my children, it is better never to run my fingers through my wife's hair, it is better not to be able to brush my own teeth, it is better never to be able to drive a car, it is better to be paralyzed and never feel anything from the neck down, and it is better to have stage III anaplastic oligondendroglioma than to find myself outside the kingdom of God.It is better never to see the sunset or the sunrise, never see the stars in the sky, never to see my daughter in her little dress-up clothes, never to see my son throw a ball - it is better never to have seen those things than to have seen those things and yet end up outside the kingdom of God. How horrible hell must be.
Matt Chandler
After his wife died, in great pain C. S. Lewis realized, “If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came.”3 Our own suffering is often our wake-up call. But even if you aren’t now facing it, look around and you’ll see many who are....Suffering and evil exert a force that either pushes us away from God or pulls us toward him....Unfortunately, most evangelical churches—whether traditional, liturgical, or emergent—have failed to teach people to think biblically about the realities of evil and suffering. A pastor’s daughter told me, “I was never taught the Christian life was going to be difficult. I’ve discovered it is, and I wasn’t ready.”...On the other side of death, the Bible promises that all who know him will fall into the open arms of a holy, loving, and gracious God—the greatest miracle, the answer to the problem of evil and suffering. He promises us an eternal kingdom on the New Earth, where he says of those who come to trust him in this present world of evil and suffering, “They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21:3–4)
Randy Alcorn
We want God to change situations. God wants to change us in them.
Wayne Stiles
This is perhaps why so many of us who know love fear love. We know that love is not the absence of pain. If anything, love is the promise of pain. No one has loved more deeply than God. Has anyone ever been more betrayed? God would not know suffering if He did not know love. But because He is Love, He chose to suffer on our behalf. Without love there is no glory in suffering.
Erwin Raphael McManus
You can be saved without suffering, but you cannot be sanctified without suffering. That doesn't mean you seek it out, but it does mean you see it for what it is. It's an opportunity to glorify God.
Mark Batterson
We don’t have a good excuse before God if our nation and people are suffering as a result of our complacency
Sunday Adelaja
Admiral Nelson won the great Battle of Trafalgar against the French during the Napoleonic Wars. The Viscount of Camperdown, who also won many battles during that period, was one of the admirals under Nelson. The Viscount of Canperdown's family crest had a ship with full sails on it and with two little Latin words: Disce pai—"Lean to suffer." That is precisely what Peter and Paul and Job and Moses and Jesus would say to you and me as believers in the fallen world. "Learn to suffer.
J. Ligon Duncan III
While God is not the author of evil and He never prompts or condones sin, nothing occurs without His sovereign oversight. Others may choose to do evil deeds and God's people may suffer in the short term, but He will transform the evil intentions of evil people into opportunities for the enrichment of those in His care.
Charles R. Swindoll
Christianity is like a nail," he (Yemelian Yaroslavsky). "The harder you strike it, the deeper it goes.
John Ortberg
Whether it's a Christian or a non-Christian, there's nothing like suffering to show us how small, needy, and not in control we are. Suffering has a way of sobering us up to the realization that we can't make it on our own, that we need help, that we're broken.
Tullian Tchividjian
Anyone that refuses to grow will remain in the past. It is a demand of life
Sunday Adelaja
Let go of the past and cling to the future.
Dr. Reverend Garry A. Scheuer Jr.
Those who have hurt you in the past cannot continue to hurt you now unless you hold on to the pain through resentment.
Rick Warren
By looking at the Bible as if it were fundamentally about us, we totally miss the Point–like the two on the road to Emmaus. As Luke 24 shows, it's possible to read the Bible, study the Bible, and memorize large portions of the Bible, while missing the whole point of the Bible. It's entirely possible, in other words, to read the stories and miss the Story.
Tullian Tchividjian
If you know who you are, you do not need to consider yourself to be worse or better than someone else
Sunday Adelaja
Do not depreciate a creation of God
Sunday Adelaja
The government can make laws, but only the God can give self-esteem where there is none
Sunday Adelaja
Stories give color to black and white information.
Todd Stocker
In the absence of a story or foundation that gives hope or meaning, life has become a never-ending quest for pleasure and experience. Instead of being good, people want to feel good.
Mark Sayers
God made you for a reason and your life has profound meaning! We discover that meaning and purpose only when we make God the reference point of our lives.
Rick Warren
Divine presence gives meaning to what seems to have no meaning
Sunday Adelaja
A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person.
Timothy J. Keller
Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavours, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavour, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God's calling, can matter forever.
Timothy J. Keller
Your calling is to be faithful to God where you are, and in doing this all work is sacred, spiritual, and worthy of your full attention and energy. When you get to work, you are not entering a secular environment as much as you are bringing the sacred into the world by following Christ wherever you are.
Joe Thorn
The "layman" need never think of his humbler task as being inferior to that of his minister. Let every man abide in the calling wherein he is called and his work will be as sacred as the work of the ministry. It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. The motive is everything. Let a man sanctify the Lord God in his heart and he can thereafter do no common act.
A.W. Tozer
With every calling comes the anointing you need to be able to stand firm in the situations that you will have to face
Sunday Adelaja
We are chosen by God, it was not by coincidence. We have been accorded the dignity of kingship and we are called to take the Kingdom to the world. The destiny of millions of people depends on us.
Sunday Adelaja
Our calling is to exalt the name of the Lord above every other name. God has translated us into His Kingdom and revealed to us the way to greatness so that we can glorify Him.
Sunday Adelaja
Serving God brings us to a place of great honour. Putting people in ministry is helping them to find their calling and their place in the body of Christ.
Sunday Adelaja
Nothing is as important as your calling and purpose in life.
Sunday Adelaja
Why do lazy, minimum effort employees always seem to find places where they feel "underappreciated"?
Matt Chandler
I’m fulfilling my calling when I raise my voice high
Sunday Adelaja
Our calling is connected to our area of dominion.
Sunday Adelaja
It is a special privilege and calling to live in two millenniums.
Sunday Adelaja
Life and calling are founded on relationships with other people.
Sunday Adelaja
You’re actually fulfilling your calling by going to work and giving your best.
Sunday Adelaja
When you have to make a choice, think of the impact your decision may make on your calling
Sunday Adelaja
What if followers of Christ stopped looking for work in places where the MOST number of Christians Christians lived and started looking for work places where the LEAST Christians lived?
David Platt
I’m fulfilling my calling when I raise my voice concerning injustice
Sunday Adelaja
I’m fulfilling my calling when I raise my voice for the truth
Sunday Adelaja
A husband's work as provider will be so difficult that it can only be fulfilled in the power of the Spirit and a transformed life.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
I’m fulfilling my calling when I seek to uphold righteousness in all spheres of life
Sunday Adelaja
The way the early Protestants taught on the other hand is that everybody is a full time minister in their various places of work. They went to the extent of saying, your job, profession, occupation is your calling
Sunday Adelaja
I’m fulfilling my calling no matter what is happening and against whom
Sunday Adelaja
And we need Christians who don’t make others feel guilty (and don’t feel guilty themselves) when one of us follows a different passion than another. I read and write a lot. That’s what I do well. But that doesn’t mean anyone should feel guilty for not reading and writing as much as I do. You have your own gifts and calling. We have to be okay with other Christians doing certain good things better and more often than we do.
Kevin DeYoung
God expects fruits from every calling, every talent and every gift
Sunday Adelaja