Discipleship Quotes - Page 11

To many, "The Bible is a form of verbal wallpaper, pleasant enough in the background, but he stop thinking about it after you have lived in the house for a few weeks.

No man is considered just and virtuous who does not know whence he came and wither he is going. – Napoleon

This wasn't a legalistic play. He simply wanted more and more of God.

True spirituality is not taught, it's caught. Once our sails have been unfurled to the Spirit, henceforth our motivation for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is immense gratitude.

Prayer is listening.

Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affect our behavior in the real.

Because we don't know the state of our children's souls, and because they might simply want to please us by praying to be saved, we must continue to give them the Law and encourage them to ask God for faith to believe that He is as good as He says He is.

There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.

A good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, "There you go again; let's call this to a halt. You can do something different." Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect.

Managing games comes second. Managing people comes first.

Edwards’s God was glorious, full of beauty, and seemingly uninterested in making people feel insecure. Edwards was a mystic, a man who didn’t simply write or preach about God, he experienced him.

Judgement is the forbidden objectivization of the other person which destroys single-minded love. I am not forbidden to have my own thoughts about the other person, to realize his shortcomings, but only to the extent that it offers to me an occasion for forgiveness and unconditional love, as Jesus proves to me.

You can't counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision.

It is easy to get faith into our heads. It is hard to get faith into our bloodstream.

The repentance we are called to is about choosing one audience over another.

Any believer who has not encountered the Cross is not yet a follower of Christ

Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction.

It's remarkable how very many things there are that a king may not do.

Mine is to chew on the appropriate texts and make them delectable.

A Christian understanding of the world sees a child's character not as genetically determined but as shaped to a significant degree by parental discipleship and discipline.

What am I doing? Tearing myself. My usual occupation at most times.

(Bonhoeffer's) change was not an ungainly, embarrassing leap from which he would have to retreat slightly when he gained more maturity and perspective. It was by all accounts a deepening consistent with what had gone before.

each year, she finds her friendships less volatile and easier, because she increasingly succeeds at looking past their flaws and disappointments and homing in on their pleasures and on what set them in motion to begin with. And she wonders why she didn’t do that sooner, why she gave in to so much fury and sorrow when she could have just let those emotions go.

Who can be astonished at anything, when he has once been astonished at the manger and the cross? What is there wonderful left after one has seen the Saviour?

although the stress response was involuntary, the relaxation response required practice.[6]

He assumed that the shape of renewal is death and resurrection.

You'd think God would come right out and tell us what to do in the Bible, but He doesn't. He mostly tells stories, and He rarely stops the story to say what the point is. He just lets the characters and conflict hang in the air like smoke.

Jesus says to anyone who uses their faith or lack of faith to excuse their acts of disobedience to his call: First obey, do the external works, let go of what binds you, give up what is separating you from God's will! Do not say, I do not have the faith for that. You will not have it so long as you remain disobedient, so long as you will not take that first step. Do not say, I have faith, so I do not have to take the first step. You do not have faith, because and so long as you will not take that first step. Instead, you have hardened yourself in disbelief under the appearance of humble faith.

In every historical period, the religious groups that grow most rapidly are those that set believers at odds with the surrounding culture.

(Pastor Chuck) Smith told his elders in no uncertain terms that if the church had to turn away young people because of bare feet and clothes that they would be better off ripping up the carpet and replacing the pews with steel folding chairs.

We need heroes who'll inspire us so that maybe next time we'll dig a little deeper and find our best self.

Perhaps, she had dreamed, she would teach some future King, shaping his child mind for a new and better world.

Prayer is a way of language practiced in the presence of God in which we become more than ourselves while remaining ourselves.

What could make a man stands taller than a newborn son?

The whitest robes, unless their purity be preserved by divine grace, will be defiled by the blackest spots.

His Majesty has done absolutely nothing but waste his time darling around eating sweets, contributing to the boy's adolescent chubiness, and to the sense of the country's political drift. Rather than being encouraged to govern, the Shah's courtiers preferred to encourage him in his idleness.

The author sees Luke's loyalty to the apostle Paul "depicted architecturally in the great church at Rome known as St. Paul Outside the Walls. There, a statue of Luke holding a writing stylus commemorates not only his work as a Gospel author but his faithfulness to Paul.

Never was living beauty so enchanting as a dying Saviour.

Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.

In the context of today, this WAS heroism.

We would do our theology better if more was at stake in what we said.

The farther you get from the actual historical person of Jesus and His time, the more the church knows about Jesus and understand more deeply the truth of the Scriptures. We know more of the truth of Jesus the Risen Lord and His Word because we have been the recipients of more than 2000 years of faith, of life lived in the power of the Spirit and the Word in our midst. The power of of the presence of the Risen Lord is not static, but dynamic, and growing ever stronger as the kingdom of the earth comes more into its fullness in time and place. It is an awesome thought that calls us to responsibility and gratefulness for having been given the gift from those who have gone before us in faith. It is our privilege and inheritance, which we must be sure to pass on to those who come after us, in forms that are ever richer, more expressive and inclusive of others.

The lightheaded and the fashionable are always willing to shed tears for distant underdogs.

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.

I want every one of our members to grow into maturity more quickly than they seem to, but the Lord has taught me to shepherd people, call them to repentance and let Matthew 18:12­–14 play out.

Focusing on effective leadership without focusing on a willingness to follow is like studying clapping by studying only the left hand.

the sculpting of the brain’s circuitry during this period of brain growth depends to a great degree on what a child experiences day-to-day.

Battling busyness is a community response.

Backward we are naturally to all good things, and it is a lesson of grace to learn to go forward in the ways of God.

I do not politicize Christianity nor my discipleship as Jesus did not politicize either His divinity nor his humanity.

He was cross-examining my subconscious .

A faithful dependent, I overlook his folly.

As frustrating as the battle for purity must be, I suppose it's easier if you've got company.

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. Leon Cass

Only he who cries out for the persecuted Jews can sing Gregorian chants. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

We will have to work hard to rest.

In the sympathy of Christ we find a sustaining power.

He gave himself fully to the penitent life, fasting, praying, confessing his wickedness and execrating himself in public. He became a better man in the small matters of his days, an even better, wiser king in the great matters of state.

There is no condition of life in which we cannot abide in Jesus. We have to learn to abide in Him wherever we are placed. Our Brilliant Heritage, 946 R

Like many men who experience fatherhood relatively late in life, Martin Luther was a devoted parent. Luther wrote his children letters of touching intensity, patiently converting the joys of the Christian life into a language of storytelling fit for the very young. A home with children brought out the best in Luther in a way that theological disputation patently did not.