Discipleship Quotes - Page 13

We need alert listeners to give dignity to those stretches in our lives when we are not aware of participating in anything we think might be embraced by the kingdom of God.

We email, Facebook, tweet and text with people who are going to spend eternity in either heaven or hell. Our lives are too short to waste on mere temporal conversations when massive eternal realities hang in the balance. Just as you and I have no guarantee that we will live through the day, the people around us are not guaranteed tomorrow either. So let's be intentional about sewing the threads of the gospel into the fabric of our conversations every day, knowing that it will not always be easy, yet believing that eternity will always be worth it.

Our small group is committed to getting the biblical text under our skin.

This is one of the difficulties and pleasures of studying the Inklings; Christians all, they offer, along with the expected 20th-century psychological explanations for behavior, unexpected spiritual ones.

If all you are doing is spending time with the struggling members of your church and you are not building proactively into your church's culture, and you are being shortsighted and limiting the effectiveness of your ministry.

Mentoring is the cultivation of young adults, the tender caring for and nurturing of them so that they will grow, flourish, and be fruitful.

She noticed, as an exceptional woman would, that her stepson was exceptional.

I thought parenting was going to reveal my strengths, never realizing that God had ordained it to reveal my weaknesses.

There's no such thing as a mistake, really. It's just an opportunity to do something else.

You don't realize your story is changing you until you look back.

Conversion, constant conversion, is the message of the Gospel.

I must first have the sense of God's possession of me before I can have the sense of His presence with me.

Realtechnik is skeptical about linear progress. It encourages humility, a state of mind in which we are most open to facing problems and reconsidering decisions. It helps us acknowledge costs and recognize the things we hold inviolate.

God wants us to have soft hearts and hard feet. The trouble with so many of us is that we have hard hearts and soft feet.

Students are taught how to do things, but many are not forced to reflect on why they should do them or what we are here for.

Belief and confusion are not mutually exclusive; I believe that belief gives you the direction in the confusion. But you don't see the full picture. That's the point. That's what faith is. You can't see it. It comes back to instinct. Faith is just up the street. Faith and instinct, you can't just rely on them. You have to beat them up. You have to pummel them to make sure they can withstand it, to make sure they can be trusted.

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

It is a wicked sophistry to justify the worldliness of the Church by the cross of Christ.

Sometimes, too, when their spiritual masters, such as confessors and superiors, do not approve of their spirit and behavior (for they are anxious that all they do shall be esteemed and praised), they consider that they do not understand them, or that, because they do not approve of this and comply with that, their confessors are themselves not spiritual. And so they immediately desire and contrive to find some one else who will fit in with their tastes; for as a rule they desire to speak of spiritual matters with those who they think will praise and esteem what they do, and they flee, as they would from death, from those who disabuse them in order to lead them into a safe road—sometimes they even harbour ill-will against them. Presuming thus, they are wont to resolve much and accomplish very little. Sometimes they are anxious that others shall realize how spiritual and devout they are, to which end they occasionally give outward evidence thereof in movements, sighs and other ceremonies; and at times they are apt to fall into certain ecstasies, in public rather than in secret, wherein the devil aids them, and they are pleased that this should be noticed, and are often eager that it should be noticed more.

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.

Christian spirituality combines a sense of the awe and majesty of God with a sense of His intimate presence.

If I can hold God's attention, I can hold the world's..

He did wrong. He has acknowledged it before the people. He repents it. How many kings have the humility to do that?

It is a pity that we cannot persuade all ministers to be men, for it is hard to see how other was they can be truly men of God.

Word-centered people who enter counseling will be more likely follow the guidance set out in Scripture. Because they know more of the depth of their sin, they are more willing to allow other church members to help them stay on that right path.

With passion you want to possess. The conversion of passion into compassion is the whole problem of marriage.

No one here is embarrassed of their gift.

If teachers are uncomfortable at their own school, they will pass on their uncertainties or negative attitude to students.

The author, at the time a Carter speechwriter in the 1980 campaign, showed visible distress at his boss's performance and was warned by a friend in the traveling press, lest he become the story.

Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.

The Bible Belt is collapsing. The world of nominal, cultural Christianity that took the American dream and added Jesus to it in order to say, 'you can have everything you ever wanted and Heaven too,' is soon to be gone. Good riddance.

They ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances.

Christ distributes courage through community. He dissipates doubt through fellowship. Max Lucado

The author relates by way of illustration that the human heart contains both a throne and a cross. If we occupy the one, Jesus occupies the other.

We must help men and women see the epic in the ordinary details of life.

A prophet is not someone who first had an idea. He is the one to first believe in it and take it to its conclusion.

For a long time, I thought I was good at relationships because I was charming.

A continual diet of the Word satisfies, and it builds an appetite for more.

What Paul understands by holiness or sanctification (is) the learning in the present of the habits which anticipate the ultimate future.

You don't need a prophet to tell you to eat.

Trying to know God and serve Him before we come to love Him is exhausting.

No one ever made more trouble than gentle Jesus meek and mild.

Let us always remember that Christ calls men and women not only to trust Him as Savior, but also to follow Him as Lord. That call to discipleship must be part of our message if we are to be faithful to Him.

King was a transformed person. Evil was no longer a theory.

Accept suffering as a part of God's tenderizing process.

Contentment is not a power that may be exercised naturally, but a science to be acquired gradually.

When the range and depth of the suffering of others and what we do to one another no longer bothers us, nor moves us to remedy the situation and stop the pain, then we have lost a part of our own humanity, our own soul.

True service is a lifestyle. It acts from the ingrained patterns of living. It springs spontaneously to meet human need.

To give to others is but sowing seed for ourselves.

Most people in America, when they are exposed to the Christian faith, are not being transformed. They take one step into the door, and the journey ends. They are not being allowed, encouraged, or equipped to love or to think like Christ. Yet in many ways a focus on spiritual formation fits what a new generation is really seeking. Transformation is a process, a journey, not a one-time decision.

When a person is evoked for who she is, not who she is not, the most often result will be the inner healing of her heart through the touch of affirmation.Jesus said you are to love one another as I have loved you, a love that will possibly lead to the bloody, anguish gift of yourself, a love that forgives seven times seven, that keeps no record of wrong. This is the criterion, sole norm, the standard of discipleship in the New Israel of God.

watch out for schools that promise your kids will "experience success." I'm teaching Plato's Dialogues these days, and I noticed that Socrates never let his students experience success. Socrates won the argument every time.

I am learning that man can live profoundly without masses of things.

My life is too short, and God’s work is too great for me to think of making a home for myself in this world.

There is nothing I like better than conversing with aged men. For I regard them as travelers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire whether the way is smooth and easy or rugged and difficult. Is life harder toward the end, or what report do you give it?

We will go no place where we cannot take our Master with us. While others take their liberty to sin, We will not renounce our liberty to rebuke and confront them.

The cross where Jesus died became also the cross where His apostle died. The loss, the rejection, the shame, belong both to Christ and to all who in very truth are His. the cross that saves them also slays them, and anything short of this is a pseudo-faith and not true faith at all.

An animal will conquer others. A Spirit-filled man conquers himself – self-discipline, self-control.

A big part of me needed something outside myself to tell me who I was. The thing that had been designed to tell me who I was was gone.

Paul was terribly personal. The books I like are the ones that make you feel like you are with a person who is being quite vulnerable, telling you all sorts of stuff that is personal, and that's the thing Paul did that makes me like him.