Ministry Quotes - Page 2

My call to the ministry was not a miraculous or supernatural something. On the contrary it was an inner urge calling me to serve humanity.

The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken.

Walden is the report of a man torn by two powerful and opposing drives – the desire to enjoy the world and the urge to set the world straight.

To die trying is the proudest humans thing.

We must all have a ministry we can function in, no matter how small

Our musical artistry and leadership of people need to work together to create an environment that welcomes participation instead of causing disengagement.

Even if you are completely busy at work, you should still have a constant ministry in the church

In order to know your ministry, you need to start serving and be under the leadership of someone, who already knows his ministry

As salvation is personal, so also is the territory every individual has to possess.

You have to bring relevance to people before teaching them the ways of Christ

Like the hub of a wheel, the church’s corporate life is an extension of the good news that God was in Christ reconciling the whole world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.

You have to discover the needs of the people you want to minister to

God trains His soldiers, not in tents of ease and luxury, but by turning them out and using them to forced marches and hard service. He makes them ford through streams, and swim through rivers, and climb mountains, and walk many a long mile with heavy knapsacks of sorrow on their backs.

Cause every task of your day to be a sacred ministry to the Lord. however mundane your duties, for you they are a sacrament.

The Russian people were just like us. They were victims of their own government. Ronald Reagan

Let us practice the fine art of making every work a priestly ministration. Let us believe that God is in all our simple deeds and learn to find Him there.

Where did Jesus’ ministry resources come from? The Scriptures give eight sources of possible income for the moneybag carried by Judas. The following Scriptures will show that Jesus never asked the synagogue congregants for free-will offerings. Nor do we see the synagogue leaders asking people to make offerings to Jesus. The custom in Jesus’ time involved charity and taking care of the needs of travelers including those who preached?

Our goal in life is to bring the Kingdom of God to people and help change their lives

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.

To do the work of others is slavery. To do the work of God is true liberation.

God wants every member of the Body of Christ to be a blessing one to another; that’s why, everyone has to be involved in a ministry.

If you have really given your burden over to God, then soon your ministry will bring you great joy!

Shoddy work is not just shoddy work. It's a failure of love.

Colonel Henry Blake, a surgeon: "I can paint a barn with someone else's blood. I just can't stand to see my own.

Mercy ministry always comes down to this: you can help, but only Jesus can heal.

[O]ur English divines are sounder in it than any in the world, generally: I think because they are more practical, and have had more wounded, tender consciences under cure, and less empty speculation and dispute (336-7).

Every experienced pastor knows that what the penitent heart says about itself is much more consequential than well-made truthful sentences that shout from the outside of the inner voice of conscience. No element of confession is more crucial than the discipline of listening. The attentive listener is a chosen agent of divine reconciliation. When the moment for keen listening is offered, take it as an inestimable gift.

To get leaders to become stakeholders in ministry and to understand the DNA of your church, you must invest in them, equip them, and raise the bar of accountability.

Helping people to know God and to be obedient to him is perhaps the greatest gift we can bestow. Understood in this way, Christian education can be be one of the most compassionate ministries of the church.

You can take the minister out of the pulpit, but you can’t take the ministry out of the minister.

If Jesus didn't do it, don't say the Father does. If Jesus did do it, don't say the Father doesn't.

If we are established in a ministry it will be very difficult for the devil to uproot us

Serving God brings us to a place of great honour. Putting people in ministry is helping them to find their calling and their place in the body of Christ.

To fully carry out your purpose as believers, you have to discover where the people you want to minister to are

God sees it all and He gives you the chance to show faithfulness in your ministry to Him

Let our liberty be practically exhibited by serving the Lord with gratitude and delight.

One major teaching of the Protestants that we the Protestants of today must go back to is the fact that the European Protestants did not emphasize five fold ministry the way we do today. Today our teaching on the five fold ministry only tends to view only those called to the five fold ministry as those called to be ministers, while the rest of the congregation is just viewed as laity who just go to secular jobs.

All ministries, therefore, must be subjected to this test—if they do not glorify Christ, they are not of the Holy Spirit.

Cast all the problems and troubles that people come to you with onto Him, and you can relax and stay healthy

Fred dislikes the idea going into the ministry partly because he doesn't like "feeling obligated to look serious", and he centers his doubts on "what people expect of a clergyman".

I would like to encourage you to stop thinking of what you're doing as ministry. Start realizing that your ministry is how much of a tip you leave when you eat in a restaurant; when you leave a hotel room whether you leave it all messed up or not; whether you flush your own toilet or not. Your ministry is the way that you love people. And you love people when you write something that is encouraging to them, something challenging. You love people when you call your wife and say, 'I'm going to be late for dinner,' instead of letting her burn the meal. You love people when maybe you cook a meal for your wife sometime, because you know she's really tired. Loving people - being respectful toward them - is much more important than writing or doing music.

You are all seen by a God who is proud of those day to day things you do. Ministry doesn't always mean speaking at a pulpit often it comes dressed as everyday work. Don't ever doubt that what you do matters, don't believe that a inspirational speaker or pastor is more worthy then you, for ministry is a state of mind not a career path. God can and will use you in mighty ways through your day to day normal routine.

Teach the people the Word before converting and baptizing them

She wisely reasoned that my chosen husband was no ordinary man, that his whole life was absolutely dedicated to God and His service, ad that I must never, never hinder him by trying to put myself first in his heart.

Are you dedicated to your patient or your ego?

People will love him (Theodore Roosevelt) for the enemies he has made.

Our main mandate in our place of work is to make sure that the people open up their hearts to others

Surely, if there could be regrets in heaven, the saints might mourn that they did not live longer here to do more good.

Has what you do for God become more important to you than the Lord Himself?

The essence of a mature human being in religious terms is the ability to see, to be aware of others' suffering and to be touched by it.

If your ministry can't work without you, then it is no longer Christ-centered. Minister toward Jesus, not yourself.

One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary.

The more God-centered our worship practices, the more mercy-centered our life.

We are not here to build our empire only but also to help people discover the kingdom of God

Some contemporary theology has been enamored with the heady idea of an imagined freedom that functions without any law or norm or rule of obligation. The technical name for this idea is antinomianism. This yen for freedoms other than Christ's freedom has compounded the problems in pastoral theology. Pastoral practice has at times been exceedingly ready to be guided by this antinomian tendency in theology that implies: if God loves you no matter what, then your own moral responses to God's absolute acceptance make little or no difference; God is going to love you anyway, so assert your individual interest, express yourself, do as you please, and above all do not repress any impulses. It is on the basis of this normless, egocentric relativism that much well-intended liberal pastoral practice has accommodated to naturalism, narcissism, and individualism. It has therefore steered consistently away from any notion of admonition, hoping to avoid 'guilt trips.' But ironically, guilt is more likely to be INCREASED by the lack of timely, caring admonition. For if there is no compassionate admonition, we tend to hide our guilt in ways that make it worse.

Curiosity – if not desire, if not plain kindness – might have led him to greater zeal.

There is no magic in small plans. When I consider my ministry, I think of the world. Anything less than that would not be worthy of Christ nor of His will for my life.

God does not save us to make us forget our heritage, but to complete it.

The real power and test of our ministry (calling) is not in the pulpit or public arena, but in our private lives, our home.