Discipleship Quotes - Page 15

Your current situation and workplace are your personal mission field. Why? Because you can reach people a church can't. You're on the front lines!

The generation of American men who fought the Second World War were too struck by the scale of the effort – and the stakes of the effort – to see the war as a stage for their own personal heroism. Most men seem to have taken the lesson that there's enough honor in doing a hard job when you have to.

Show me a person in my shoes who is looking for a robot, and I'll show you someone who is looking for a person and can't find one.

Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality.

Followers of Jesus do well to spend more time engaging him than explaining him.

anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After.

The soul is "torn apart in a painful condition as long as it prefers the eternal because of its Truth but does not discard the temporal because of familiarity.

It is one thing being disciplined to plan and it is another thing being a disciple of great work. Be your own disciplinarian.

The Bible is different because it is the Word of God, by which He speaks to me. Disagreeing with the Bible would be disagreeing with God. So when I read the Bible I want to place myself ‘under’ it. I want to receive the Scripture in such a way that over time, my thinking, feeling, choosing, believing and behaving will be molded by the Word God is speaking into my life. I don’t want to critique the Scriptures; I want them to critique me and change me.

I did my best parenting by prayer. I began to speak less to the kids and more to God. It was actually quite relaxing.

He communicates authenticity to an electorate ravenous for it.

He'd made a name for himself out there in the world beyond not just in spite of the distinctly unfashionable persona he presented, but, perhaps, BECAUSE of it.

Almightiness and wisdom combined will make no failures.

This is the pedagogical paradox. The person and the teacher is required precisely because the knowledge itself is nontransferable from teacher to student.

You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances….It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

The choice we face is not, as many imagine, between heaven and hell. Rather, the choice is between heaven and this world. Even a fool would exchange hell for heaven; but only the wise will exchange this world for heaven.

An employee made a mistake that cost the company $10 million, he walked into the office of Tom Watson, the C.E.O., expecting to get fired. “Fire you?” Mr. Watson asked. “I just spent $10 million educating you.

I'm Jewish in the way Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant.

The church is the primary arena in which we learn that glory does not consist in what we do for God but in what God does for us.

Let not him who accepts light in an instant despise him who gropes months in shadows.

Reagan understood an important distinction that (Lyndon) Johnson never grasped: being in control and being successful aren't always the same thing.

To love with expectations is, in the end, an oppressive, driven thing, and people know it when they receive it.

Men and women of God through the centuries have lived out this abiding truth. There are no heroes of the faith who did not live out this extravagant lavishing of their time on Jesus. When we examine their private lives, we see that they needed to abide for strength and for wisdom. They were addicted to extravagant time in the presence of Jesus because it gave them life and joy and was the only thing that fulfilled them.

You can’t build rich lives simply by reading sermons or following abstract rules. Example is the best teacher. Moral improvement occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed,

Of his first enemy encounter, Gen. Grant said that after his initial fear, "My heart resumed its place." Grant said he suddenly realized his potential enemy he had been "as much afraid of me as I had been of him.

If I turn mine eyes upon myself, I find myself a traitor with the rest;

I found myself speaking more slowly (in an attempt to obey the Bible in speech), as if I was speaking French instead of English.

If thou rememberest that thou art going to heaven, thou wilt not sleep on the road. If thou thinkest that hell is behind thee, and the devil pursuing thee, thou wilt not loiter.

there was a common understanding that religion generally served the powerful, who manipulated the words of the gods and prophets to justify their greed and lust for power. Yet Christianity comes in numerous guises; mystical to dogmatic; it is used by some as a reason to justify their wars, their oppression and their hatreds. Others use it to oppose those wars and other injustices.

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.

If we cannot all FEEL alike, we can all FEED alike on the Bread Life.

Shanahan (the head coach) doesn't allow failure to take root.

Who are we aligning ourselves with? Are we aligning ourselves with the presence of God as it is abused, broken, bleeding, and mocked and scorned even now in this world? Do we take that one step down, risking insecurity, violence, guilt by association, to stand beside those who are both victim and accused, and public sinner – criminal and despised in society?

Is God giving you victory this day, if not this whole day, how about this very minute?

It is by suffering that Christ brings it in to the kingdoms of this world

Everything in Scripture is either preparation for the Gospel, presentation of the Gospel, or participation in the Gospel.

To know there is a better story for your life and to choose something other is like choosing to die.

Weakness is not the problem, but my delusion of my strengths is.

Friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel unguarded and fluid with their close friends.

The end is where we start from. T.S. Eliot

Standing on the shoulders of the great allows you to see further than everyone.

Giving up everything must mean giving over everything to kingdom purposes, surrendering everything to further the one central cause, loosening our grip on everything. For some of us, this may mean ridding ourselves of most of our possessions. But for all of us it should mean dedicating everything we retain to further the kingdom. (For true disciples, however, it cannot mean hoarding or using kingdom assets self-indulgently.)

The goodness of the mother is written in the gaiety of the child.

Are you following Christ's ambitions for your life or expecting Him to help you reach yours?

Your child may be under more stress than you realize. Remember that situations around to past experiences. Just because you do not see something as a big deal does not mean it is not for your child.

Humility is the earmark of God's genuine servant.

The intensity of the love of the upright is not so much to be judged by what it appears as by what the upright long for. It is our daily lament that we cannot love enough.

Even in a hostile press conference with hostile questions there was drama, and he could benefit from the drama and the hostility. He mastered the greatest art of television, appearing to be spontaneous without in fact being spontaneous.

The road that leads to heaven is risky, lonely, and costly in this world, and few are willing to pay the price. Following Jesus involves losing your life-and finding new life in him. Follow Me, pg. 11

As we grow into maturity in Christ our distinctiveness is accentuated, not blunted. General directions, useful as they are, don't take into account the details that face us as holiness takes root in the particular social and personal place we are planted.

The author sees Joseph of Genesis as a type of Christ's Pentecostal power. He who was thought dead has been raised in power, and the power is evident in the chariot he sends for his own.

Evangelism cant be our focus! We must not stop sharing the good news, but here’s the deal, here’s the wonderful thing, it gets done along the way as you do discipleship. Great commission is just about going to disciple the nations and you know what happens... as you disciple them evangelism takes place, because it’s done in the context of discipleship.Here’s the issue: We have to reframe evangelism within the context of discipleship

Preaching reveals God in action here and now -- for ME.

The Bible provocatively evokes desire.

Spiritual disciplines answer the shallow world.

Any honours that come our way are only stolen from him to whom alone they really belong, the Lord who sent us.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance.

The cornerstone of the Roman legionnaires' astonishing fighting spirit can be attributed to their training.

Because their example is powerful, they're somewhat responsible for the weaklings who copy them.

One Cardinal entered his cathedral for the first time at his funeral.