“The first word of the gospel is not ‘love.’ It is not even ‘grace.’ The first word of the gospel is ‘repent.’ From Matthew through Revelation, repentance is an urgent and indispensable theme that is kept at the very forefront of the gospel message.” —Richard Owen Roberts (quoted in Intercessors for America Newsletter, Apr 2003, page 3)

“Man sees your actions, but God your motives.” —Thomas a Kempis

“Holiness is goodness on fire.” —Walter Rauschenbusch

“We know religion, but we don’t understand holiness.” —John Tisdale

“We are taught in an especial manner to pray that God would give his Holy Spirit unto us, that through his aid and assistance we may live unto God in that holy obedience which he requires at our hands.” —John Owen (1664)

“We like to talk about syndromes instead of sin. It’s not the same thing. So I think you just have to talk about human weakness, human failure, human transgressions, and there’s a word for that, and it’s the word ‘sin.'” —Jean Bethke Elshtain (quoted in Homiletics, Jul/Aug 2003, page 10)

“To read the Bible as God’s word one must read it with his heart in his mouth, on tip-toe, with eager expectancy, in conversation with God. To read the Bible thoughtlessly or carelessly or academically or professionally is not to read the Bible as God’s Word. As one reads it as a love letter is read, then one reads it as the Word of God.” – Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

“Too often in the body of Christ we are content to let God help us cope when He is fully prepared to fully deliver.” – Jason Knight

“‘Pentecost does not belong to any one denomination,’ says Frank M. Reid, who has been pastor at Bethel – begun by freed slaves in the late 1700s and among the founding members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church – since 1988. ‘It is part of every Christian’s journey. … Every Christian must have a Pentecostal experience – there’s no way around it.'” – Source: http://www.charismanews.com/a.pl?ArticleID=7508

“Forgiveness means the deed is no longer connected with us; we have nothing to do with it, or it with us. Forgiveness is absolute and complete. When we have been forgiven, there is nothing left for which we can be forgiven again. Trying, then, to offer a sacrifice to God to prove our sincerity or to live up to His free gift misses the truth of forgiveness. It would be like tying a string around your finger to remind you not to forget to buy the carton of milk you purchased at the market two days ago! I have been forgiven; you have been forgiven – for all things for all time.” – Daniel A. Brown

“The great Christian revolutions come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when somebody takes radically something that was always there.”
– H. Richard Niebuhr

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (quoted at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/aprilweb-only/114-32.0.html?start=2)

“When the Communists took over Russia in 1917, Lenin did not ban the Church, but forbade it to do any good works. Central elements of Christian ministry such as feeding the hungry, teaching and caring for the sick and orphaned were taboo for the Church. Seventy years later, the Church was completely irrelevant. Today, without Lenin, many churches still do exactly that, concentrating only on preaching, with identical results. Take service out of the church, and it becomes irrelevant and weak.”

Eric Swanson

“There are three images in my mind which I must continually forsake and replace by better ones: the false image of God, the false image of my neighbours, and the false image of myself.”

C. S. Lewis

“Christians are to be the good news before they share the Good News.”

Joe Alrich

“Why do folks allow their daughters to dress like an advertisement for something they are not selling? Why are they bringing them up to think that their worth as a human being rests in being someone else’s object instead of someone’s beloved person?”

Mary Walsh (Touchstone, Jul/Aug 2006)

“In these postChristian times, a major pastoral task is to explain Christianity to people who really have no idea what it means.”

Philip Graham Ryken (quoted in Preaching, Sep/Oct 2003, Vol 19, No 2, page 29)

“The strongest pressures we face to avoid Scripture’s teachings are when those teachings run contrary to some popular and cherished cultural viewpoint. One only need consider the Bible’s teaching on such ‘controversial’ issues as salvation that is found exclusively through faith in Christ, to realize that our temptation to compromise comes most forcefully where our culture finds biblical teaching repulsive.”

Bruce A. Ware (quoted in Moody, Mar/Apr 2003, page 37)

We cannot participate in God’s work but then insist on doing it our own way. … We can’t live a life more like Jesus by embracing a way of life less like Jesus.

— Eugene Peterson  

Learn the lesson that if you are to do the work of a prophet, what you need is not a scepter but a hoe.

— Bernard of Clairvaux  

The great Christian revolutions come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when somebody takes radically something that was always there.

— H. Richard Niebuhr  

The church doesn’t need any more “powerful” leaders. It needs more leaders with prophetic power.

— Thomas Hohstadt  

The greatness of a man’s power is in the measure of his surrender.

—William Booth  

God’s power is most visible in the helpless and broken figure of Jesus of Nazareth hanging dying on the cross.

— Michael Jinkins  

God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are, and if we faithlessly discard situation after situation, moment after moment, as not being ‘right,’ we will simply have no place to receive his kingdom into our life. For those situations and moments are our life.

— Dallas Willard  

The golden rule for understanding in spiritual matters is not intellect, but obedience.

— Oswald Chambers
 

“Progress in holiness can best be measured not by the length of time we spend in prayer, not by the number of times we go to church, not by the amount of money we contribute to God’s work, not by the range and depth of our knowledge of the Bible, but rather by the quality of our personal relationships.”

—Stephen F. Winward

“When we major in minors and blow insignificant trifles out of proportion, we imitate the Pharisees. When we make dancing and movies the test of spirituality, we are guilty of substituting a cheap morality for a genuine one. We do these things to obscure the deeper issues of righteousness. Anyone can avoid dancing or going to movies. These require no great effort or moral courage. What is difficult is to control the tongue, to act with integrity, to show forth the fruit of the Spirit.”

—R. C. Sproul

“Our moral compass is not broken. The needle continues to point in the same direction. But ‘south’ has been mislabeled as ‘north.’ And for a generation, these reversed compasses have been handed to kids by parents, teachers, government officials, various advocacy groups and —yes —even some clergy. ‘Broken moral compass’ is a convenient but inaccurate description of the problem. Our moral compass has been altered, inverted and in fact sabotaged by those who are unwilling or unable to follow a legitimate compass, but who conceal their accountability by inducing the rest of us to go along with them. There is still time to repair our moral compass. All that’s needed is to compare our compass with a genuine one and re-label the directions. The real difficulty comes in following the corrected compass. The genuine path isn’t always easy. Often it leads uphill and over difficult terrain. But it is always straight, and eventually it will get us home again.”

—David C. Stolinsky

“Hypocrisy is the respect that vice pays to virtue.”

—La Rochefoucauld

“We felt frustrated toward the end of our journey because there are several villages that we were not allowed to enter because they are controlled by the rebels. However, we do not want to give up the area. We will continue to ask God to open the doors of these villages for us so that we can freely bring in the gospel of salvation to the people there and even to the rebels.”

—A Filipino missionary [from Christian Aid Mission]

“Love is the first comforter, and where love and truth speak the love will be felt where the truth is never perceived. Love indeed is the highest of all truth; and the pressure of a hand, a kiss, the caress of a child, will do more to save sometimes, than the wisest argument, even rightly understood. Love alone is wisdom, love alone is power; and where love seems to fail, it is where self has stepped between and dulled the potency of its rays.”
“To let their light shine, not to force on them their interpretation of God’s designs, is the duty of Christians towards their fellows. If you who set yourselves to explain the theory of Christianity, had set your selves instead to do the will of the Master, the one object for which the Gospel was preached to you, how different would now be the condition of that portion of the world with which you come into contact! Had you given yourselves to the understanding of his word that you might do it, and not to the quarrying from it of material wherewith to buttress your systems, in many a heart by this time would the name of the Lord be loved where now it remains unknown. The word of life would then by you have been held out indeed.”

— George Mac Donald from Wind From Stars

“We must work passionately and infatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

Image: MJCdetroit / Wikimedia Commons

“That God is omnipresent ‘ everywhere equally present ‘ is a source of continual wonder for me. God’s omnipresence is, as one man has put it, one of those million-gallon truths that, try as we might, we simply cannot contain with our quart-sized heads. But within the scope of God’s omnipresence, we know from both Scripture and experience that God is not present everywhere for precisely the same purposes. For example, while he is always everywhere present to sustain (for in him ‘all things hold together,’ Col 1:17), from time to time he is also present in various places to accomplish other purposes, such as to discipline, to punish, to bless, or to empower. We are not satisfied knowing God is there. We want to know He is near.”

— C. J. Mahaney