"According to a survey conducted by Robert Half International, Inc., working parents are willing to cut their pay and hours by as much as 21 percent to spend more time with their families; 76 percent would also forfeit career advancement for more family or personal time. The simplicity trend has almost become its own religion." - Leadership Winter 1997

"With the appearance of the two-bathroom home, Americans forgot how to cooperate. With the appearance of the two-car family, we forgot how to associate, and with the coming of the two-television home, we forgot how to communicate." - Dr. John Baucom, quoted in New Man, Jul/Aug 1997, page 15

"Despite the pessimistic headlines announcing that the strong family in America is an endangered species, I refuse to give up hope. Who says 'endangered' means 'doomed'? If we're ingenious enough to preserve the bison, whooping crane, and humpbacked whale, I'm convinced we can preserve the family." - Charles Swindoll in The Strong Family, Zondervan, 1994

"The family is not one of several alternative lifestyles; it is not an arena in which rights are negotiated; it is not an old-fashioned barrier to a promiscuous sex life; it is not a set of cost-benefit calculations. It is a commitment for which there is no feasible substitute. No child ought to be brought into the world where that commitment from both parents is lacking." - James Q. Wilson, quoted in Readers Digest, March 1996, pg. 32

"When we envision the church as an idealized family, we are not capable of welcoming the stranger. When family is the only metaphor we use, people with whom we cannot achieve intimacy, or with whom we do not want to be intimate, are squeezed out. Since intimacy often depends on social and economic similarities, church then becomes a place of retreat rather than true hospitality. Such a church does everything in its power to eliminate the strange and cultivate the familiar. Such a church can neither welcome the stranger nor allow the stranger in each of us to emerge." - Molly Marshall, quoted in The Other Side, Nov/Dec 1996, page 57

"A survey reported in the Wall Street Journal found that out of 100 CEOs 85 say they would like more family time, but only seven said they actually expect to make it happen. - Vital Ministry, Sep/Oct 1997, page 49

"Fathering is not a pure science. All fathers fail, but the mark of a true father is what he does after he fails. - Ken Canfield, quoted in Ministries Today, May/Jun 1996, page 106

"Kevin's father used to say, 'If the son's not a better man than his father, they're both failures.' - Kevin A. Miller, editor of Leadership

Family

"I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when feeling it not. I believe in God even when He is silent." - Inscription on a cellar wall in Germany where Jews hid from Nazis

"The only thing that can defeat the faith God has given you…is you. You must use your faith, exercise your faith, engage your faith. Until it is pressed into service, faith is only potential. To use the old exercise cliché, you must 'use it or lose it!'" - Andrew Merritt in My Faith Is Taking Me Someplace

"Remember it is the very time for faith to work when sight ceases. The greater the difficulties, the easier for faith; as long as there remain certain natural prospects, faith does not get on even as easily as where natural prospects fail." - George Mueller, quoted in Streams in the Desert

"At its best, our age is an age of searchers and discoverers. At its worst, it is an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it. The fiction that celebrates this last state will be the least likely to transcend its limitations, since, when the religious need is banished successfully, it usually atrophies, even in the novelist. The sense of mystery vanishes. A kind of reverse evolution takes place. The whole range of feeling is dulled." - Flannery O'Connor in "Mystery and Manners", Christianity Today: February 9, 1998

The Just Shall Live By Faith
Charles Wesley in The Unpublished Poetry of Charles Wesley, Vol. II

"O that I might the power receive
The simple life of faith to live.
A stranger by the world unknown,
To live, shut up with Christ alone!
Jesus, my real Life Thou art,
Inspire
Thyself into my heart,
And fill'd with purity drive
I live, thro' endless ages thine."

"I feel like God's leading me out, so I'm kind of sleeping with my shoes on. When God parts the sea, you don't want to say, 'Oh rats, where are my sandals?'"

"The amazing thing about the whole joy of Christianity is it's something you can't find, it's something that has to find you. Once we submit ourselves to God, the things of God chase us down like dogs, and you can't escape them. I think we can stifle the Spirit. We can thwart the work of God in our own lives. We can choose to nourish that which should be crucified and ignore that which should be nourished, but God ain't done with any of us."

"Faith is walking with God. The biggest problem with life is that it's just daily. You can never get so healthy that you don't have to continue to eat right…Spiritually, we're in much the same place…it's not what you did, and not what you say you're going to do, it's what you do today.'"

"Our faith becomes real when we focus on what never changes instead of our ever-changing opinions." - Rich Mullins, CCM November, 1997

"We have now moved from the burden of raising money to the adventure of trusting God." - Author unknown

"If our faith is something that really does not make a very big difference, if it is actually not crucial that we or others believe, no wonder it seems boring to our young. Anything we don't care much about can't be very interesting. The things we do care about, however, we inevitably talk about…If faith is real, it seeks expression. It will communicate and profess. It will have the energy of passion." - John F. Kavanaugh in The Word Encountered

"Faith in God will not get for you everything you may want, but it will get for you what God wants you to have. The unbeliever does not need what he wants: the Christian should want only what he needs." - Vance Havner in By the Still Waters

"At various times, Jesus publicly denounced sinners as snakes, dogs, foxes, hypocrites, fouled tombs, and dirty dishes. So that His hearers would not miss the point. He sometimes referred to the objects of His most intense ridicule both by name and by position, and often face to face. Christ did not affirm sinners; He affirmed the repentant. He well understood that sometimes it is wrong to be nice." - Theologian Michael Bauman, quoted in Tabletalk, June 1996, page 58

"Faith is the vitamin that makes all we take from the Bible digestible and makes us able to receive it and assimilate it. If we do not have faith, we cannot get anything." - A.W. Tozer in Rut, Rot or Revival

"It is your living faith in the adequacy of the One who is in you, which releases His divine action through you." - W. Ian Thomas in The Saving Life of Christ

"Faith does not operate in the realm of the possible. There is no glory for God in that which is humanly possible. Faith begins where man's power ends." - George Mueller

Faith