Quotes by Speakers - Page 166

We must surrender ourselves to God, not our assignments.
E'yen A. Gardner
Sometimes new opportunity means new opposition. Not everything God asks us to do will be comfortable.
Joyce Meyer
[God] deposits a dream of what we can be for Him, a dream that acts as our internal honing device.
Wayne Cordeiro
Everything you do is connected to who you are as a person and, in turn, creates the person you are becoming. Everything you do affects those you love. All of life is covenant.Imbedded in the idea of prayer is a richly textured view of the world where all of life is organized around invisible bonds or covenants that knit us together. Instead of a fixed world, we live in our Father's world, a world built for divine relationships between people where, because of the Good News, tragedies become comedies and hope is born.
Paul E. Miller
God is a person, and his universe reflects his personhood. The closer something is to the character of God, the more it reflects him and the less it can be measured. Things such as integrity, beauty, hope, and love are all in the same category as prayer. You can tell their presence and even describe them, but you can't define them, simply because they are too close to God's image.
Paul E. Miller
I call them sacred echoes because I noticed that throughout my relationships, daily life, and study, the same scripturally sound idea or phrase or word will keep reappearing until I can no longer avoid its presence." -The Sacred Echo
Margaret Feinberg
Hunger for God compels us to seek the Lord. At times our desire for God overcomes our physical desires, and the ache for God is palpable. Throughout the Scriptures, God is faithful to reward those who search for him. Written during one of King David's low points, while living on the run in the wilderness, he cries, "Oh God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water." Though David hides in the wilderness, he doesn't stay there physically or spiritually. When we seek God with our whole hearts and souls, he promises to reveal himself to us." -Hungry for God
Margaret Feinberg
The promise of a dreamer’s future will always remain greater than their present ability. God will always give them dreams that are further along than their current level of maturity.
Wayne Cordeiro
And like an echo, God often uses the repetitive events and themes in daily life to get my attention and draw me closer to himself." - The Sacred Echo
Margaret Feinberg
Sowing seeds of kindness always reaps a crop of heavenly blessings.
Rebecca Barlow Jordan
I can only imagine how happy life would be if we could stay so grounded in our faith that we would never waver in our positive attitudes.
Tracie Miles
If the universe does consist of a battle between the devil and God, the final analysis should conclude that religion would have been the devil’s most brilliant move and science, God’s.
Steve Maraboli
Don't ever be discouraged with yourself because you have not arrived at success, but instead be pleased that you are pressing toward it.
Joyce Meyer
Never put yourself in a position to be made an example of.
Gary Hopkins
‎You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Anne Lamott
[Your] dream will challenge, prod and haunt you until you surrender to its call.
Wayne Cordeiro
Charles de Foucauld, the found of the Little Brothers of Jesus, wrote a single sentence that's ahad a profound impact on my life. He said, "The one thing we owe absolutely to God is never to be afraid of anything." Never to be afraid of anything, even death, which, after all, is but that final breakthrough into the open, waiting, outstretched arms of Abba.
Brennan Manning
Authentic faith leads us to treat others with unconditional seriousness and to a loving reverence for the mystery of the human personality. Authentic Christianity should lead to maturity, personality, and reality. It should fashion whole men and women living lives of love and communion. False, manhandled religion produces the opposite effect. Whenever religion shows contempt or disregards the rights of persons, even under the noblest pretexts, it draws us away from reality and God.
Brennan Manning
Hating skin color is contempt for God's divine creative imagination. Honoring it is appreciation for conscious, beautiful-love-inspired diversity.
T.F. Hodge
Ragamuffins are simple, direct and honest. Their speech is unaffected. They are slow to claim, "God told me..." As they make their way through the world, they bear wordless, prophetic witness.
Brennan Manning
Self-will and prayer are both ways of getting things done. At the center of self-will is me, carving a world in my image, but at the center of prayer is God, carving me in his Son's image.
Paul E. Miller
He is always doing something--the very best thing, the thing we ourselves would certainly choose if we knew the end from the beginning. He is at work to bring us to our full glory.
Elisabeth Elliot
We must go out into a desert of some kind (your backyard will do) and come into a personal experience of the awesome love of God.
Brennan Manning
The unconditional love of God leads to a life of freedom and transforms each day into a potentially wild adventure.
Randy Elrod
I believe that a godly home is a foretaste of heaven. Our homes, imperfect as they are, must be a haven from the chaos outside. They should be a reflection of our eternal home, where troubled souls find peace, weary hearts find rest, hungry bodies find refreshment, lonely pilgrims find communion, and wounded spirits find compassion.
Jani Ortlund
If you wait, your heavenly Father will pick you up, carry you out into the night, and make your life sparkle. He wants to dazzle you with the wonder of his love.
Paul E. Miller
... one flaw throws the loveliness of [everything else] into focus. I remember reading that Shakers deliberately introduced a mistake into the things they made, to show that man shouldn't aspire to the perfection of God. Flawed can be more perfect than perfection.
Gretchen Rubin
We will never be happy until we make God the source of our fulfillment and the answer to our longings. He is the only one who should have power over our souls.
Stormie Omartian
[Orange] is one of God's favorite colors--- He stuck it right there between red and yellow as the second color in the rainbow. He decorates entire forests with shades of orange every autumn. It shows up in sunrises at the start of the day, sunsets at the end of the day, and in the glow of the moon at the right time of night.
Reggie Joiner
God takes everyone he loves through a desert. It is his cure for our wandering hearts, restlessly searching for a new Eden... The best gift of the desert is God's presence... The protective love of the Shepherd gives me courage to face the interior journey.
Paul E. Miller
God lives in the place of praise. If we want to be where He is, we need to go to His address.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss
Creation discloses a power that baffles our minds and beggars our speech. We are enamored and enchanted by God's power. We stutter and stammer about God's holiness. We tremble before God's majesty... and yet, we grow squeamish and skittish before God's love.
Brennan Manning
Sometimes when we say "God is silent," what's really going on is that he hasn't told the story the way we wanted it told. He will be silent when we want him to fill in the blanks of the story we are creating. But with his own stories, the ones we live in, he is seldom silent.
Paul E. Miller
God is the name we give to the science we don't understand. Science is the name we give to the God we don't understand.
Steve Maraboli
For Ragamuffins, God's name is Mercy. We see our darkness as a prized possession because it drives us into the heart of God. Without mercy our darkness would plunge us into despair - for some, self-destruction. Time alone with God reveals the unfathomable depths of the poverty of the spirit. We are so poor that even our poverty is not our own: It belongs to the mysterium tremendum of a loving God.
Brennan Manning
I have realized that whatever good comes to me, comes from God, whatever bad comes to me, God has allowed it, and I choose to be thankful for both.
Jeff Goins
The vast desire and capacity a woman has for intimate relationships tells us of God's vast desire and capacity for intimate relationships. In fact, this may be The most important thing we ever learn about God--the He yearns for relationship with us. "Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God" (John 17:3). The whole story of the Bible is a love story between God and His people. He yearns for us. He cares. He has a tender heart.
Stasi Eldredge
Embedded in the larger story of redemption is a principle we must not miss: God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things in the lives of others.
Paul David Tripp
We tend to be taken aback by the thought that God could be angry. how can a deity who is perfect and loving ever be angry?...We take pride in our tolerance of the excesses of others. So what is God's problem?... But love detests what destroys the beloved. Real love stands against the deception, the lie, the sin that destroys. Nearly a century ago the theologian E.H. Glifford wrote: 'Human love here offers a true analogy: the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor.'... Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference... How can a good God forgive bad people without compromising himself? Does he just play fast and loose with the facts? 'Oh, never mind...boys will be boys'. Try telling that to a survivor of the Cambodian 'killing fields' or to someone who lost an entire family in the Holocaust. No. To be truly good one has to be outraged by evil and implacably hostile to injustice.
Rebecca Manley Pippert
God's Will is what we would choose if we knew what God knows.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss
Cynicism places the cynic at the center seat of judgement with the self appointed authority to criticize and condemn.
Jayce O'Neal
In moments of prayer, people tend to pose as a critic and point out percieved flaws in God's art.
Steve Maraboli
Live in the wisdom of accepted tenderness. Tenderness awakens within the security of knowing we are thoroughly and sincerely liked by someone...Scripture suggests that the essence of the divine nature is compassion and that the heart of God is defined by tenderness.
Brennan Manning
It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance — lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt
Alan W. Watts
When I see God I see Beauty, I see Love, I see Joy, I see Peace and I see You. God loves us let us love one another.
E'yen A. Gardner
Our identity rests in God's relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ.
Brennan Manning
For those who feel their lives are a grave disappointment to God, it requires enormous trust and reckless, raging confidence to accept that the love of Jesus Christ knows no shadow of alteration or change. When Jesus said, "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened," He assumed we would grow weary, discouraged, and disheartened along the way. These words are a touching testimony to the genuine humanness of Jesus. He had no romantic notion of the cost of discipleship. He knew that following Him was as unsentimental as duty, as demanding as love.
Brennan Manning
You must know that you are worth much to me whether you accomplish anything or not. Even if you are rejected in the world's eyes, you are valuable to me.
Stormie Omartian
While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life.
Brennan Manning
God didn’t give fear a body. God gave love a body.
Steve Maraboli
We are beautiful because we are sons and daughters of God, not because we look a certain way.
Kate Wicker
God will never disappoint us… If deep in our hearts we suspect that God does not love us and cannot manage our affairs as well as we can, we certainly will not submit to His discipline. …To the unbeliever the fact of suffering only convinces him that God is not to be trusted, does not love us. To the believer, the opposite is true.
Elisabeth Elliot
Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don't get to meet some of the people who love God back.
Anne Lamott
No matter what the cause, God is only as willing as you are.
Steve Maraboli
The sorrow of God lies in our fear of Him, our fear of life, and our fear of ourselves. He anguishes over our self-absorption and self-sufficiency... God's sorrow lies in our refusal to approach Him when we sinned and failed.
Brennan Manning
If the Almighty directs our steps, we've no need to look back over our shoulders.
Liz Curtis Higgs
We must transcend the illusion that money or power has any bearing on our worthiness as children of God.
Steve Maraboli
There's no safety outside of God.
Beth Nimmo
The Word we study has to be the Word we pray. My personal experience of the relentless tenderness of God came not from exegetes, theologians, and spiritual writers, but from sitting still in the presence of the living Word and beseeching Him to help me understand with my head and heart His written Word. Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace. We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of *knowing* Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited.
Brennan Manning
Many Spirit-filled authors have exhausted the thesaurus in order to describe God with the glory He deserves. His perfect holiness, by definition, assures us that our words can't contain Him. Isn't it a comfort to worship a God we cannot exaggerate?
Francis Chan