Discipleship Quotes - Page 5

I never think of him as a scholar assaulting me with how much he knows, but as a teacher eager to share a lifelong passion for the subject.

When the convert emerges from the water, the world seems changed. The world has not changed, it is always wonderful and horrible, iniquitous and filled with beauty. But now, after baptism, the eyes that see the world have changed.

The narrator refers to a character as "an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them.

Young children especially need the visual reinforcement of seeing you turn to Scripture for wisdom.

We lose much consolation by the habit of reading His promises for the whole church, instead of taking them directly home to ourselves.

No language about God will ever be fully adequate to the burning mystery which it signifies.

Life is a mess. And theology must be lived out in the midst of that mess.

With a more expansive stretch, there’s a better chance that I’ll be around at the precise, random moment when one of my nephews drops his guard and solicits my advice about something private. Or when one of my nieces will need someone other than her parents to tell her that she’s smart and beautiful.

you cannot be friends either with boy or man unless you give yourself away in the process, and Mr. Pembroke did not commend this. He, for “personal intercourse,” substituted the safer “personal influence,” and gave his junior hints on the setting of kindly traps, in which the boy does give himself away and reveals his shy delicate thoughts, while the master, intact, commends or corrects them.Originally Rickie had meant to help boys in the anxieties that they undergo when changing into men: at Cambridge he had numbered this among life’s duties. But here is a subject in which we mustinevitably speak as one human being to another, not as one who has authority or the shadow of authority, and for this reason the elder school-master could suggest nothing but a few formulae. Formulae, like kindly traps, were not in Rickie’s line, so he abandoned thesesubjects altogether and confined himself to working hard at what was easy.

Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won't! You'll have ...A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it.

You know after any truly initiating experience that you are part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about you henceforward, but you are about life.

When we shift from personal purity to personal happiness, we lose biblical hope because we are not focusing on God's agenda, we are focusing on our own. God's agenda is guaranteed on our agenda is not.

Religious leaders who continue mechanically to expound the Scriptures without regard to the current religious situation are no better than the scribes and lawyers of Jesus’ day who faithfully parroted the Law without the remotest notion of what was going on around them spiritually,” wrote Tozer. “They fed the same diet to all and seemed wholly unaware that there was such a thing as meat in due season.

It is ill to offer God one duty stained with the blood of another.

I love the quaint saying of a dying man, who exclaimed, "I have no fear of going home; I have sent all before me; God's finger is on the latch of my door, and I am ready for Him to enter.

Pat Conroy embraced his new hometown with the grateful passion of a refugee.

How vigilant we must be to ensure that we don’t allow our impression of Jesus to be held captive by the prevailing mores of our secular culture! Rather, it is essential that we continue to return to the Gospels to ensure that the reverse occurs: to allow Jesus to hold our hearts and imaginations captive in response to the dominant thinking of our time. For exiles trying to live faithfully within the host empire of post-Christendom, the Gospel stories are our most dangerous memories. They continue to fire our imaginations and remind us that it’s possible to thrive on foreign soil while serving Yahweh, but it’s the kind of thriving that often rejects popular wisdom. These stories are the standard by which we judge all other stories, all other descriptors of life today. If, after reading these dangerous biblical stories, you can’t imagine Jesus the Messiah as a televangelist, strutting around on stage in a flashy suit, playing it up for the cameras, then you are forced to reject this image and seek another mode of being Christ today.

Part of the genius of (Nick) Sabin's system was that he understood that no matter the skill set, he was inheriting vulnerable kids from various backgrounds. For those times when they made poor decisions, as they invariably did, the safety net must be strong as far and wide as possible.

Don't get me wrong, I like NASCAR and shopping at Nordstrom's, but discipleship is intrinsic as a lifestyle."~R. Alan Woods [2013]

He made his character his platform.

Tomorrow's freedom is today's surrender.

Just as at sea those who are carried away from the direction of the harbor bring themselves back on course by a clear sign, on seeing a tall beacon light or some mountain peak coming into view, so Scripture may guide those adrift on the sea of the life back into the harbor of the divine will.

Amazing tributaries feeding where the rivers will never flow....

Sometimes the imagination could be even crueler than the bone saw.

No one has ever been deeply changed by an act of the will. The only thing that can re-forge and change a life at its root, is love.

It is the doom of the Christian church to be always distracted with controversy. John Quincy Adams

Every good man resists others in those points in which he resists himself.

Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel.

Individually the disciple and friend of Jesus who has learned to work shoulder to shoulder with his or her Lord stands in this world as a point of contact between heaven and earth, a kind of Jacob’s ladder by which the angels of God may ascend from and descend into human life. Thus the disciple stands as an envoy or a receiver by which the kingdom of God is conveyed into every quarter of human affairs.

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

The author says crises tend to reveal the connectivity of systems that had previously been study only in isolation.

According to Aquinas, effort may not be the best measure of our virtue.

Mohr was one of the most talented people on the staff of Time, in print as well as in person—the two are often different.

Obedience appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace.

Managing relationships (with start ups) is more like teaching.

Regular, modest failures are actually essential to many forms of resilience.

It is not great counts God blesses so much as likeness to Jesus.

Her characters tend to err when they reject the grubby and complex circumstances of everyday life for abstract and radical notions. They thrive when they work within the rooted spot, the concrete habit, the particular reality of their town and family.

The only way to be productive is to realize we don't HAVE TO be productive. Our goal is to PLEASE God, not APPEASE God.

How to teach again what has been taught correctly it incorrectly 1000 thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. How to render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold.

You cannot contain evil by shaming it, or making people feel guilty, but only by revealing it toward it is, and then seeing the good as better.

How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?

Dost thou want another eye beside that of Him who sees every secret thing?

Much of our understanding of God's action in outlying is achieved in hindsight. When a particular crisis or event in our life has passed we cry out in astonishment like Jacob, "The Lord is in this place and I never knew it.

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

It doesn't get any easier. You have to stay close to the people you trust so they can put you back together again.

The years have simply reconciled us to the fact that we are all here for the transformation.

After the original rapture of conversion had settled in, (Bob) Dylan backed away from his obviously Christian lyrics and returned to his more metaphorical use of language.

We learn the language of prayer by immersing ourselves in the language that God uses to reveal Himself to us.

The cross is a crisis point for all societies which seek to produce me in and women of quiescence, men and women who are trained to give unquestioning, uncritical obedience to worldly powers and not to Christ.

Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. It's as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you'll never know the meaning of your experiences until you've had enough of them to provide reference.

He was so much the humblest one that Wendy was especially gentle with him.

We have been shown how to fight hate without becoming hate ourselves. We have been given a Companion and a Friend and not just a good idea. We have been given joy in the midst of failure, and not just a way of winning or being right.

Be ruthless in one important area: Yourself. Be ruthless about your commitment to Christ. Be ruthless about your intellectual growth. Be ruthless about finishing well. One of the biggest areas we should be ruthless about is our time. How much time do you spend complaining about your problems to people who can't help you solve them? How much time do you talk when you should be doing? When it comes to others, be gracious. But when it comes to you and your time, be ruthless.

[Jesus] plan called for action, and how He expressed it predicted its success. He didn't say "you *might* be my witnesses," or "you *could* be my witnesses," or even "you *should* be my witnesses." He said "you *will* be my witnesses.

I experienced the Church to be this refuge within and beyond myself.

The overemphasis on standardized tests forces teachers to teach the same restricted, unintuitive curriculum. Longtime educator Brent Evans has said that today's schools are organized as assembly lines, "(running at a set speed) and with each worker (teacher) at designated places (way levels) on the assembly line performing predetermined actions on products (students) considered to be somewhat generic (one-size-fits-all) and passive (waiting to be filled or formed to the desired shape).

Where kairos is an event word—something that has a beginning and ending—repentance (metanoia) is a process word, as is believe (pistis). The Circle is a process, a way of living that does not have a specific beginning and ending. One does not become a disciple of Jesus and stand still; discipleship is a lifestyle of learning. And this learning begins with a change of heart.

Sex education in the modern manner has been well-described as plumbing for hedonists.

Good disciplemaking requires both intentionality and relationality. It means being strategic and being social. Most of us are bent one way or the other. We’re naturally relational, but lacking in intentionality. Or we find it easy to be intentional, but not relational. We typically tip (or sometimes lean) one way or the other as we begin the disciplemaking process. But tipping and leaning won’t cover the full picture of what life-on-life disciplemaking requires. It’s not just friend-to-friend, and it’s not just teacher-to-student. It’s both. There is the sharing of ordinary life (relationship) and seeking to initiate and make the most of teachable moments (intentionality). There are the long walks through Galilee and the sermons on the mount. Disciplemaking is both organic and engineered, relational and intentional, with shared context and shared content, quality and quantity time.