"Fear not that your life shall come to an end, but rather that it shall never have a beginning." - John Henry Newman

"The remarkable thing about fearing God is that when you fear God you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God you fear everything else." - Oswald Chambers in The Highest Good, Christianity Today, Feb. 9, 1998

"Fear is a tremendous detriment in coaching or any other endeavor. So many times coaches think of all the bad things that can happen. We fret about the reaction of the public if we lose. Pretty soon we get stilted in what we're doing as a coach. But if my primary goal is to serve and honor God, I'm able to do what I think I need to do and then accept the consequences in relatively good grace by knowing I have served him. Then I measure success by how faithful I've been in honoring and serving God, not by wins and losses. A very freeing attitude!" - Tom Osborne, longtime football coach at the University of Nebraska

"Fear is not a bad place to start a spiritual journey. If you know what makes you afraid, you can see more clearly that the way out is through the fear." - Kathleen Norris in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

"I have this terrible fear that I'm going to be forced to take a general knowledge test in public." - Dick Cavett

Fear

We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine - 'dull dogma,' as people call it. The fact is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man - and the dogma is the drama." - Dorothy Sayers (quoted in New Covenant, Jan. 1998, page 6)

Doctrine

"The repeated promises in the Qur'an of the forgiveness of a compassionate and merciful Allah are all made to the meritorious, whose merits have been weighed in Allah's scales, whereas the gospel is good news of mercy to the undeserving. The symbol of the religion of Jesus is the cross, not the scales." - John Stott in Authentic Christianity

"You must learn, you must let God teach you, that the only way to get rid of your past is to make a future of it. God will waste nothing." - Phillips Brooks, quoted in Heirlooms

"What happened to the reality that forgiveness of sin, before God or before human-kind, is a spiritual cleansing, not just a coping skill?" - Katie Funk Wiebe in Border Crossing

"Forgiveness cannot mean that we cover up a fault with the 'mantle of charity.' Divine things are never a matter of illusion and deception. On the contrary, before the sin is forgiven the mantle with which it is covered must be removed. The sin must be unmercifully - yes, unmercifully - exposed to the light of God's countenance." (Psalm 90) - Helmat Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father

"Pardon is an inherent characteristic of the Christian community. To pardon means not to fixate [on] the past but to create possibilities for persons to change and to realign the course of their lives…pardon forges Christian community." - Gustavo Gutierrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells

"God wants us to be merciful with ourselves. And besides, our sorrows are not our own. He takes them on Himself, into His heart." - George Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

"True mercy is, so to speak, the most profound source of justice." - Pope John Paul II, 'Dives in Misericordia'

"He that cannot forgive others break the bridge over which he himself must pass if he would ever reach heaven; for every one has need to be forgiven." - George Herbert, quoted in N.T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer

"Our first task is not to forgive, but to learn to be the forgiven. Too often to be ready to forgive is a way of exerting control over another. We fear accepting forgiveness from another because such a gift makes us powerless, and we fear the loss of control involved…only by learning to accept God's forgiveness as we see it in the life and death of Jesus can we acquire the power that comes from learning to give up control." - Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom

"Instead of genuine forgiveness, our generation has been taught the vague notion of 'tolerance.' This is, at best, a low-grade parody of forgiveness. At worst, it's a way of sweeping the real issues in human life under the carpet…Jesus' message [of forgiveness of sins] offers the genuine article and insists that we should accept no man-made substitutes." - N.T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer

"Confession is nothing but humility in action…when there is a gap between me and Christ, when my love is divided, anything can come to fill the gap. Confession is a place where I allow Jesus to take away from me everything that divides, that destroys." - Mother Teresa, No Greater Love

"Christian forgiveness should not be a refusal of strength, but rather ought to manifest an alternative power; Christian love, whether of neighbors or of enemies, should be a sign not of repressed anger and hatred but of anger and hatred confronted and, eventually, overcome and transcended; it should not be an internalized guilt that further diminishes and destroys but a truthful engagement with the causes and motivations underlying the situation of brokenness." - L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness

"What I envy most about you Christians is your forgiveness. I have nobody to forgive me." - Novelist Marghanita Leski, shortly before dying, quoted in Servant, Fall 1997

Forgiveness

"Instead of truth, our culture is being stuffed with artful falsehoods…One such falsehood is associated with the word 'choice'. Are you pro-abortion? Of course not. No one, not even President Clinton or the head of Planned Parenthood, favors abortion, but they are 'pro-choice'... In other areas, however, such as cigarette smoking or the desire of the state of Virginia to have an all-male military school, choice loses all its power. It is not choice but falsehood that reigns."

"The concept of same-sex marriage is (also) an artful falsehood. Of course, a court...can declare such a union to be legally marriage, just as it could conceivably declare all dogs to be legally cats, but this falsehood would not help the pooches to climb trees. "

"It is not polite to call a lie a lie or a liar a liar, but unless and until each Christian is willing to rise up against falsehood, we shall continue to live in bondage to enslaving illusions." - Harold O. J. Brown in 'Current Thoughts and Trends', January 1997

"Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management and politics to mere technique." - James MacGregor Burns

"Nearly two in three adults believe ethics 'vary by situation' or that there is no 'unchanging ethical standard of right and wrong.' Among those in the 18-34 age group, 79% said they hold to the view that ethics change based on the situation. USA Today, 4/29/97"

"Once you get rid of ethics the rest is a piece of cake." - J. R. Ewing

Ethics

"God treat[s] His Creation with integrity: each thing in its own order, each thing the way He made it…if God treats the tree like a tree, the machine like a machine and the man like a man, shouldn't I, as a fellow-creature, treat the machine like a machine, the man like a man, the plant like a plant - each thing in integrity in its own order? And for the highest reason: because I love God - I love the One who has made it! Loving the Lover who has made it, I should have respect for the thing He has made." - Francis Schaeffer in Pollution and the Death of Man

"It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills a sparrow can hear the story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at all. - Dorothy Sayers, quoted in God in Pain, by Barbara Brown Taylor, Christianity Today, March 2, 1998

"Our evangelical culture tends to take the awesome reality of a transcendent god who is worthy to be feared and downsize Him so He could fit into our 'buddy system.' The way we talk about Him, the way we pray, and, more strikingly, the way we live shows that we have somehow lost our sense of being appropriately awestruck in the presence of a holy and all-powerful God. It's been a long time since we've heard a good sermon the the fear of God. If God were to show up visibly, many of us think we'd run up to Him and high-five Him for the good things He had done." - Joseph M. Stowell in Moody (Nov./Dec. 1997) Christianity Today, February 1998

"The danger is a popular democracy is that we may try to democratize God. If we don't like God's program, we can simply vote Him out and run for office ourselves." - Cornelius Platinga, Jr. (quoted in Christianity Today, September 1997

"I often wonder if my knowledge about God has not become my greatest stumbling block to my knowledge of God." - Henri Nouwen in A Cry for Mercy

"God doesn't have to be good to anybody. He doesn't owe us the breath we breathe. I figure if God has given us salvation, that's way more than we deserve, and I won't judge Him for not giving me something else."

"For me the greatest joy that I have is knowing that I do have a Father who loves me, and that He doesn't love me in a passive way. That He loves me so much that He sent Christ to take away the guilt of my sin, and that it is a real thing, that it really did happen. If I will experience joy in this life, it will be when I let other people know that there is a God who loves them, and He has taken away the sin that separates them. There is no greater joy than just that proclamation."

"Psychobabble is that language spoken by sailors who become so interested in navigating their way around the boat that they've forgotten to read the stars and the sea. They may be able to get from the galley to the head, but they will be lost in their journey from point to port. Jesus being God is the perfect picture of who God is. Jesus being man is the picture of perfect humanity. To find Him, to meditate on Him is to find God and our own true selves. It is to see the brilliant design of the boat and its course and the beauty of the sea." - Rich Mullins CCM 11/97

"As the farthest reach of our love for each other is loving our enemies, as the farthest reach of God's love for us is loving us at our most unlovable and unlovely, so the farthest reach of our love for God is loving him when in almost every way that matters we can neither see him nor hear him... when the worst of the wilderness for us is the fear that he has forsaken us if indeed he exists at all." - Frederick Buechner in A Room Called Remember

"We - or at least I - shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest. At best, our faith and reason will tell us that He is adorable, but we shall not have found Him so, not have 'tasted and seen.' Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are 'patches of Godlight' in the woods of our experience." - C.S. Lewis in Letters to Malcolm

"Far back in my boyhood I remember an old saint telling me that after some services he liked to make his way home alone, by quiet byways, so that the hush of the Almighty might remain on his awed and prostrate soul. That is the element we are losing, and its loss is one of the measures of our poverty, and the primary secret of our inefficient life and service. And what is the explanation of the loss? Preeminently our impoverished conception of God. Men who are possessed by a powerful God can never themselves be impotent. But have we not robbed the Almighty of much of His awful glory, and to that extent are we ourselves despoiled? We have contemplated the beauties of the rainbow, but we have overlooked the dim severities of the throne. We have toyed with the light, but we have forgotten the lightening. We have rejoiced in the fatherhood of our God, but too frequently the fatherhood we have proclaimed has been throneless and effeminate."

"We have picked and chosen according to the weakness of our own tastes, and not according to the full-orbed revelation of the truth, and we have selected the picturesque and rejected the appalling." - John Henry Jowett in Listening to the Giants

"Divine speech is articulation of God's presence…the magnificat is a biblical theology in miniature, because it begins and it ends in an exaltation not of Mary but of the Word." - Samuel Terrien in The Magnificat: Musicians as Biblical Interpreters

"Capitalism gets to stride around our society as objective truth. Everybody from Girl Scouts to collectors for the IRS agrees that money works. Why doesn't God's love enjoy so high a reputation? It makes more sense than money. God's love can be freely exchanged, there are no security problems at ATMs; and God's love brings more possibilities to every day than any other assets we have." - W. J. Sappenfield in the Christian Century, (April 23-30, 1997) Christianity Today, October 6, 1997

"The saints' love to God is the fruit of God's love to them; it is the gift of that love. God gives them a spirit of love for Him because He loved them from eternity. His love is the foundation of their regeneration and the whole of their redemption." - Jonathan Edwards in Religious Affections

"God's love is too good to be true, too great to be missed." - Max Lucado

God

"The word 'evangelical' has died the death of a thousand qualifications. It has become so inclusive as to be in danger of being totally empty." - R.C. Sproul quoted in National & International Religion Report, Apr. 29, 1996, page 8

"Non-Christians will insist that we should keep our religion out of the way of their politics. But the reason for that is not that Jesus has nothing to do with the public realm; it is that they want nothing to do with Jesus as Lord." - John Howard Yoder in The Death Penalty Debate

"Evangelism is not simply a matter of bringing individuals to personal faith, though of course that remains central to the whole enterprise. It is a matter of confronting the world with the good, but deeply disturbing, news of a different way of living…the way of love." - N.T. Wright in For All God's Worth

"I am the light of the world, the founder of the Christian religion said. What a stupendous phrase! And how particularly marvelous today, when one is conscious of so much darkness in the world! Let your light shine before men, he exhorted us. You know, sometimes…someone asks me what I most want, what I should most like to do ini the little that remains of my life, and I always nowadays truthfully answer - and it is truthful - 'I should like my light to shine, even if only very fitfully, like a match struck in a dark, cavernous night and then flickering out.'" - Malcolm Muggeridge in 'Jesus Rediscovered', Christianity Today: February 9, 1998

"People in the United States are greatly given to self-praise, yet the reality is that we have the most miserable cities in the modernized country and not return ashamed of our U.S. cities. If the city is a measure of our citizenship and democracy, then we are the dregs of all comparable nations. We as citizens have made pestholes of our cities." - John McKnight of the Urban Affairs Center at Northwestern University (quoted in Salt of the Earth, Mar/Apr 1997, page 32)

"Spiritual growth is named more often than evangelism, supporting community causes, strengthening the local church, and influencing legislation, as the top priority for Christians." - Emerging Trends, Summer 1992

"Forty-five percent of adults in America believe they have a responsibility to share their religious beliefs with those of other faiths. About three in ten adults have actually done so in the last year." - Barna Research Group findings as reported in Simi Valley Star, 6/29/96

"Many Christians dislike being around people who smoke or drink or curse. They are wary of inviting unchurched people into their homes: 'They might light up a cigarette, you know.' They would rather play sports in church leagues and be around Christians all the time. Such an approach to life eliminates most opportunities for evangelism.'" - Ed Dobson in Starting a Seeker-Sensitive Service (Zondervan, 1993)

"Evangelism in America, or in the Western world today, has reached the level of diminishing returns. People do not see anything to be converted to. They look around at these Christians telling them to agree to these little statements and say the enclosed prayer. They say, 'But you aren't any different from anybody else. So what am I supposed to be converted to?' We have to see changed lives." - Richard J. Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline (in Christianity Today, Oct. 12, 1992)

"Out of the 350,000 local congregations that blanket America, some 60,000 report not even a single convert in a year's time." - Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct-Dec 1992

"What is the best way to respond to people who are indifferent to Christ'? Here are some alternatives to consider:

Acceptance. When you meet someone who is indifferent to spiritual things, it is important to accept them as they are. Don't categorize or label them: instead give them permission to be what they have chosen to be. This doesn't mean you have to agree with them or approve of their actions. It means treating them as God would. Cherish them and enjoy relating to them as people of equal value in God's sight.

Identification. Be open about your own faith. Don't hesitate to mention God in your conversations or to ask permission to pray for someone who expresses a need.

Listening. Though we sometimes think of our society as 'valueless,' realize that everyone operates out of a set of values. Discover what other people think and believe by listening to them and asking them what they have believed in the past and what they believe now.

Prayer. Praying for specific individuals will make us more sensitive to them and their needs. Intercession reminds us that evangelism is not a purely human endeavor.

Witnessing. Your most powerful testimony is your own life. All too often people see little evidence that following Jesus makes any real difference in how a person lives. Generosity, trustworthiness, and sensitivity to others make the gospel credible. Create interest in spiritual things by your words, realizing that witnessing is more than just presenting the plan of salvation. 'Until Christ's historic death is understood in terms that create contemporary and personal meaning, indifference will remain.'

Patience. Realize that any movement toward god is something to rejoice about."

"Evangelism needs to be audience-sensitive rather than message-driven. We must resist the tendency to 'play God' and concentrate on lifting up Christ as Lord with our lips and our lives." - Source unknown

"It is the temptation of this pragmatic age to presume that technique is the secret of evangelism." - A. Skevington Wood (#9, Feb. 4, 1957)

Evangelism

"Ever hear that 50% of U.S. marriages are headed for divorce? It all started one year when somebody at the Census Bureau noticed that there had been 2.4 million marriages and 1.2 million divorces. Comparing those two figures without taking into account the 54 million marriages already in existence gave birth to a quotable, but highly inaccurate, statistic. The fact is only about 2% of existing marriages will fail, and in any given year only one out of eight married couples divorce. As pollster Louis Harris says, 'The idea that half of American marriages are doomed is one of the most specious pieces of statistical nonsense ever perpetuated in modern times.'" - Leadership, Sum 1996 (page 69)

"In three decades of pasturing and counseling couples, there's only one thing we've found truly makes for a lasting marriage. Both people must want to be married to each other more than they want to divorce." - A college professor quoted in Today's Christian Woman, Sept/Oct 1995

"Rabbi Earl Grollman, a professional divorce lecturer and author who believes divorce can be more traumatic than death, says, 'The big difference is, death has closure, it's over. With divorce, it's never over.'" - Charles Swindoll, Strike the Original Match

"Surrendering is not an option if you plan to win a war…or succeed in a marriage. I firmly agree with a San Francisco attorney whom I heard say, 'There are two processes that must never be started prematurely: embalming and divorce.'" - Charles Swindoll, Strike the Original Match

Divorce

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." - Aristotle

"After finding no qualified candidates for the position of principal, the school board is extremely pleased to announce the appointment of David Steele to the post.'" - Philip Streifer, Superintendent of Schools, Barrington, Rhode Island

"Excellence can be attained if you...
-care more than other think is wise
-risk more than others think is safe
-dream more than others think is practical
-expect more than others think is possible"
- Source unknown

"To be the best, you have to beat the best." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

"People never improve unless they look to some standard or example higher or better than themselves." - Tyrone Edwards

"Competing in sports has taught me that if I'm not willing to give 120 percent, somebody else will." - Ron Blomberg, Former New York Yankee

"Those who strive to be above average soon are." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

"Excellence is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, determined effort, and skilled execution." - Unknown source

"We are always surprised at the progress that comes from doing simple things well." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

"People who accomplish big things did small things well." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

"Whatever you hand finds to do, do it with your might." - Ecclesiastes 9:10

"Excellence is immortal." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

"Pursue perfection but accept excellence." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

"Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it." - George Halas

"Excellence is never granted to a man but as the reward of labor." - Sir Joshua Reynolds

"Scorn mediocrity. Embrace excellence." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Excellence