Quotes by Speakers - Page 137

If He is God, He is still in charge.
Elisabeth Elliot
Frederick Buechner writes, “Intellectually we all know that we will die but we do not really know it in the sense that the knowledge becomes a part of us. We do not really know it in the sense of living as thought it were true. On the contrary, we tend to live as though our lives would go on forever.
Francis Chan
Though lip service is paid to the gospel of grace, many Christians live as if only personal discipline and self-denial will mold the perfect me. The emphasis is on what I do rather than on what God is doing. In this curious process God is a benign old spectator in the bleachers who cheers when I show up for morning quiet time.
Brennan Manning
I'm learning to practice gratitude for a healthy body, even if it's rounder than I'd like it to be. I’m learning to take up all the space I need, literally and figuratively, even though we live in a world that wants women to be tiny and quiet. To feed one’s body, to admit one’s hunger, to look one's appetite straight in the eye without fear or shame—this is controversial work in our culture. Part of being a Christian means practicing grace in all sorts of big and small and daily ways, and my body gives me the opportunity to demonstrate grace, to make peace with imperfection every time I see myself in the mirror. On my best days, I practice grace and patience with myself, knowing that I can't extend grace and patience if I haven't tasted it.
Shauna Niequist
In God, happiness and purposeful work are a package deal.
Jennifer Dukes Lee
The art of happy-making begins when we find our happiness within instead of without.
Jennifer Dukes Lee
The older we get, the bigger the catalog of failures Satan can throw in our faces. You may think, ‘I don’t have anything to offer.’ But you can teach out of your failures as well as your successes (p. 223).
Nancy Leigh DeMoss
I now know that God is not a divinity to be met on Sundays in church.
Patty Ptak Kogutek
God will always watch out for our best, providing us with what we need and a soft landing when we seem to be falling.
Patty Ptak Kogutek
Bring on the people you want me to love, the situations you want me to take on, and the lessons you want me to learn.
Patty Ptak Kogutek
I will live each minute in gratitude.
Patty Ptak Kogutek
We may all be on the same journey but not necessarily on the same road.
Patty Ptak Kogutek
No person is 100% faithful. It is only when we see the depth of our own unfaithfulness that we can truly begin to understand the faithfulness of Jesus. He is faithful even when we are not. Thankfully, we have a perfect God who loves us imperfect people.
Jayce O'Neal
God often uses failure to make us useful. When Jesus called the disciples, He did not go out and find the most qualified and successful people. He found the most willing, and He found them in the workplace. He found a fisherman, a tax collector, and a farmer. The Hebrews knew that failure was a part of maturing in God. The Greeks used failure as a reason for disqualification. Sadly, in the Church, we often treat one another in this way. This is not God's way. We need to understand that failing does not make us failures. It makes us experienced. It makes us more prepared to be useful in God's Kingdom -- if we have learned from it. And that is the most important ingredient for what God wants in His children.
Os Hillman
Every journey has a beginning. The starting point of prayer is God. Like a father who waits to hear every detail of your life, He waits for you. You don’t need to get dressed up and go to church to reverently pray. The God of the universe invites you to come as you are. You can endure anything when you are at God’s side. He is the transformer. He turns sorrow to joy. He turns bitter to sweet.
Sue Detweiler
Real comfort is found when I understand that I am held in the hollow of the hand of the One who created and rules all things. The most valuable thing in my life is God's love, a love that no one can take away. When my identity is rooted in him, the storms of trouble will not blow me away. This is the comfort we offer people. We don't comfort them by saying things will work out. They may not. The people around them may change, but they may not. The Bible tells us again and again that everything around us is in the process of being taken away. God and his love are all that remain as cultures and kingdoms rise and fall. Comfort is found by sinking our roots into the unseen reality of God's ever-faithful love.
Paul David Tripp
One of the greatest threats to the impossible is the easily possible.
Jayce O'Neal
Achieving great things through training, tenacity & time doesn't make someone vain. It lessens vanity! Therefore, I have one question: is @realDonaldTrump vain?
Steve Cioccolanti
We don't need to pacify our issues, we need to crucify them.
Jayce O'Neal
2017 is the Year of Jubilee! Receive its blessings in your spirit! Forgive and be forgiven. Reconcile and be reconcilable. Revival is due!
Steve Cioccolanti
We will always find ourselves in trouble when we get comfortable with things as they are.
Francis Chan
It will not, however, affect one tiny bit the question of whether the text has a literal meaning because—mark this—every biblical text has a literal meaning. Many people are stunned to hear this. That is because many people think a "literal meaning" can only be conveyed by literal language. They make the mistake of assuming that an author who uses metaphor, fiction, hyperbole, or various other figures of speech does not have a literal meaning. Thus, for instance, if I say "my heart is broken", some people mistakenly imagine that I "meant nothing literally." But, of course, I do. I literally mean I am deeply grieved and I am expressing that grief via a metaphor. Likewise, if I say "I stood in line for a million years" I am using an exaggeration to communicate another literal meaning: I waited a long time. Indeed, more often than not, metaphor is exactly the right vehicle for conveying a literal meaning and is far better than nonfigurative language. The shortest distance between two minds is a figure of speech. -- Making Senses of Scripture
Mark Shea
The literal sense of the author was "creation is the orderly act of a loving Creator God." What the modern reader often hears, however, is "The universe was made in six 24-hour days." This is as wrong-headed as taking me to mean I actually stood in line a million years or that my cardiac tissue has been torn in half or that Christ had delusions of being a grape plant.-- Making Senses of Scripture
Mark Shea
Christian feminists can celebrate any sort of feminism that brings more justice and human flourishing to the world, no matter who is bringing it, since we recognize the hand of God in all that is good.
Sarah Bessey
There is no more hateful person than a Christian who thinks you’ve got your theology wrong.
Sarah Bessey
The line between sacred and secular is man-made.
Sarah Bessey
God is God. If He is God, He is worthy of my worship and my service. I will find rest nowhere but in His will, and that will is infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what He is up to.
Elisabeth Elliot
Besides, we were fifteen, and we couldn't get our feelings to match up with our brains. So we went with our feelings.
Karen Swallow Prior
From that moment, and for the rest of my life, my mother's words--perceptive and many others--have helped me to be the thing she saw and named in me.
Karen Swallow Prior
The good news of the kingdom is not freedom from hardship, suffering, and loss. It is the news of a Redeemer who has come to scue me from myself. 
Paul David Tripp
An instrument s a tool that is actively used to change something, and God has called all of his people to be instruments of change in his redemptive hands
Paul David Tripp
There's a place for doctrine and dogma, and science and history and apologetics, but, these things are not Jesus - they are humanly manufactured attempts to make people think that having the right ideas is the same thing as loving and following Jesus.
Carl Medearis
It became obvious why Catholics had built such beautiful cathedrals and churches throughout the world. Not as gathering or meeting places for Christians. But as a home for Jesus Himself in the Blessed Sacrament. Cathedrals house Jesus. Christians merely come and visit Him. The cathedrals and churches architecturally prepare our souls for the beauty of the Eucharist.
Allen R. Hunt
God loves us mucho, so much that He desires more, much more for us.
Janet P. Eckles
…when we really connect with who God is… we will find He is better than anything we could ever imagine…
Shelley Hitz
God remains the same—faithful, loving and powerful—through changes big and small.
Janet P. Eckles
Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God.
Richard Rohr
I am convinced that the human heart hungers for constancy. In forfeiting the sanctity of sex by casual, nondiscriminatory "making out" and "sleeping around," we forfeit something we cannot well do without. There is dullness, monotony, sheer boredom in all of life when virginity and purity are no longer protected and prized.
Elisabeth Elliot
Harboring bitterness against people is actually confessing their sin to myself, over and over again. Anger is akin to confessing their sin to God, dissatisfied that he hasn't done something and placing myself in his position as judge.
Paul David Tripp
Personal ministry is not about always knowing what to say. It is not about fixing everything in sight that is broken. Personal ministry is about connecting people with Christ so that they are able to think as he would have them think, desire what he says is best, and do what he calls them to do even if their circumstances never get "fixed." It involves exposing hurt, lost, and confused people to God's glory, so that they give up their pursuit of their own glory and live for his.
Paul David Tripp
Women still dream and hope, pin their emotions on some man who doesn't reciprocate, and end up in confusion.
Elisabeth Elliot
The question is simply,'Who is your master?'Once that's settled, you ask whether any word have been spoken. If it has, you have your orders.
Elisabeth Elliot
We forget that God's primary goal ia not changing our situations or relationships so that we can be happy, but changing us through our situations and relationships so that we will be holy.
Paul David Tripp
Stand true to your calling to be a man. Real women will always be relieved and grateful when men are willing to be men
Elisabeth Elliot
We’re seeking — imperfectly at every turn, no doubt — an incarnational theology, a theology that brings radical good news of great joy for all the people, good news that God loves the world and didn’t send Jesus to condemn it but to save it, good news that God’s wrath is not merely punitive but restorative, good news that the fire of God’s holiness is not bent on eternal torment but always works to purify and refine, good news that where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.
Brian D. McLaren
If you don't pray often, you won't gain a love for praying. Prayer is work, and therefore it is not very appealing to our natural sensibilities. But the simple rule for prayer is this: Begin praying and your taste for prayer will increase. The more you pray, the more you will acquire the desire for prayer, the energy for prayer, and the sense of purpose in prayer.
Leslie Ludy
Lord, please do this ... or do something better!
Priscilla Shirer
Our greatest fear as individuals & as a church should not be of failure, but of suceeding at things in life that dont really matter.
Francis Chan
Those who have the disease called Jesus will never be cured.
Brennan Manning
Leave it all in the Hands that were wounded for you
Elisabeth Elliot
In my experience, self-hatred is the dominant malaise crippling Christians and stifling their growth in the Holy Spirit.
Brennan Manning
Jesus went without comfort so that you might have it. He postponed joy so that you might share in it. He willingly chose isolation so that you might never be alone in your hurt and sorrow. He had no real fellowship so that fellowship might be yours, this moment. This alone is enough cause for great gratitude!
Joni Eareckson Tada
We are a culture that relies on technology over community, a society in which spoken and written words are cheap, easy to come by, and excessive. Our culture says anything goes; fear of God is almost unheard of. We are slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry.
Francis Chan
It is a naive sort of feminism that insists that women prove their ability to do all the things that men do. This is a distortion and a travesty. Men have never sought to prove that they can do all the things women do. Why subject women to purely masculine criteria? Women can and ought to be judged by the criteria of femininity, for it is in their femininity that they participate in the human race. And femininity has its limitations. So has masculinity. That is what we’ve been talking about. To do this is not to do that. To be this is not to be that. To be a woman is not to be a man. To be married is not to be single - which may mean not to have a career. To marry this man is not to marry all the others. A choice is a limitation.
Elisabeth Elliot
Wow! you might actually have to act like a Christian sometimes!
Joyce Meyer
So be willing to wait. Only embrace a man who has a heart for God's purposes for his life and God's heart for you. Keep hope alive!
Michelle McKinney Hammond
If we hold tightly to anything given to us unwilling to allow it to be used as the Giver means it to be used we stunt the growth of the soul. What God gives us is not necessarily "ours" but only ours to offer back to him, ours to relinguish, ours to lose, ours to let go of, if we want to be our true selves. Many deaths must go into reaching our maturity in Christ, many letting goes.
Elisabeth Elliot
I have been seized by the power of a great affection.
Brennan Manning
There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.
Anne Lamott
Don’t give up! Remember, we love to be enchanted by flowers in bloom… but don’t forget that it took many rainy days to achieve such beauty. Your bloom is coming!
Steve Maraboli