"The church is afflicted by dry rot. This is best explained when the psychology of nonexpectation takes over and spiritual rigidity sets in, which is an inability to visualize anything better, a lack of desire for improvement.
There are many who respond by arguing, "I know lots of evangelical churches that would like to grow, and they do their best to get the crowds in. They want to grow and have contests to make their Sunday school larger." That is true, but they are trying to get people to come and share their rut. They want people to help them celebrate the rote and finally join in the rot. Because the Holy Spirit is not given a chance to work in our services, nobody is repenting, nobody is seeking God, nobody is spending a day in quiet waiting on God with open Bible seeking to mend his or her ways. Nobody is doing it--we just want more people. But more people for what? More people to come and repeat our dead services without feeling, without meaning, without wonder, without surprise? More people to join us in the bondage to the rote? For the most part, spiritual rigidity that cannot bend is too weak to know just how weak it is." - A. W. Tozer
Church Growth
“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.” - Thomas Jefferson
“If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.” - Mark Twain
“I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” - Winston Churchill
“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” - George Bernard Shaw
“Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” - Frederic Bastiat, Economist (1801-1850)
“Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” - Ronald Reagan (1986)
“In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.” - Voltaire (1764)
“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you!” - Pericles (430 B.C.)
Government
"Truth is always strong, no matter how weak it looks; and falsehood is always weak, no matter how strong it looks." - Phillips Brooks
Truth
"If we cannot go away for a vacation, we can take an "inside vacation" and find grace to help in time of need. God gives more rest than time will allow!" - Vance Havner
Rest
“It is easier to serve God without a VISION, easier to work for God without a CALL, because then you are not bothered by what God requires; common sense is your guide, veneered over with Christian sentiment. But if once you receive a commission from Jesus Christ, the memory of what God wants will always come like a goad; and you will no longer be able to work for Him on the common sense basis.” - Oswald Chambers
God’s Will
"It is only when men begin to worship that they begin to grow." - Calvin Coolidge
"Religious externals may have meaning for the God-inhabited soul; for any others they are not only useless but may actually become snares, deceiving them into a false and perilous sense of security." - A. W. Tozer
“It is not enough for us to be where God is worshipped, if we do not ourselves worship him, and that not with bodily exercise only, which profits little, but with the heart.” - Matthew Henry
“God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.” - John Piper
“The shortest route to deeper and richer worship is a clearer theology.” - P.D. Manson
“The salvation of souls is a means to the glorifying of God because only saved souls can duly glorify Him.” - C.S. Lewis
“The only music minister to whom the Lord will say, "Well done, thy good and faithful servant," is the one whose life proves what their lyrics are saying, and to whom music is the least important part of their life. Glorifying the only worthy One has to be a minister's most important goal!” - Keith Green
“Every Christian is a priest, not offering a sacrifice for sins - since that has been done once and for all - but offering his person, praise and possessions.” - Vance Havner
“The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express that same delight in God which made David dance.” - C.S. Lewis
“Of all the preaching in the world, (that speaks not stark lies) I hate that preaching which tends to make the hearers laugh, or move their minds with tickling levity, and effect them as stage-plays used to do, instead of affecting them with a holy reverence of the name of God.” - Richard Baxter
“We ought to see the face of God every morning before we see the face of man.” - Dwight L. Moody
“When I bow to God, God stoops to me.” - Robert Chapman
“As long as you notice, and have to count the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.” - C.S. Lewis
“In contemporary society our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds.” - Richard J. Foster
“He loves Thee too little who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for Thy sake.” - Augustine
“Don't ever come to church without coming as though it were the first time, as though it could be the best time and as though it might be the last time.” - Vance Havner
“Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshippers meeting together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be were they to become "unity" conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship. Social religion is perfected when private religion is purified.” - A.W. Tozer
“The same church members who yell like Comanche Indians at a ball game on Saturday sit like wooden Indians in church on Sunday.” - Vance Havner
“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.” - C.S. Lewis
“Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't.” - John Piper
Worship
All quotes by A. W. Tozer…
“If there's anything necessary to your eternal happiness but God, you're not the kind of Christian that you ought to be. For only God is the true rest.”
“Sometimes I go to God and say, ‘God, if Thou dost never answer another prayer while I live on this earth, I will still worship Thee as long as I live and in the ages to come for what Thou hast done already.’ God’s already put me so far in debt that if I were to live one million millenniums I couldn’t pay Him for what He’s done for me.”
“Looking at what John wrote, I wonder how so many present–day Christians can consider an hour of worship Sunday morning as adequate adoration of the holy God who created them and then redeemed them back to Himself.”
“God is pleased with His people when His praise is continually and joyfully on their lips. The heavenly scene John describes is the unceasing cry of the adoring living creatures, ‘Holy, holy, holy!’ They rest not, day or night. My fear is that too many of God’s professing people down here are resting far too often between their efforts at praise.”
“There is a point in true worship where the mind may cease to understand and goes over to kind of delightful astonishment---probably to what Carlyle described as ‘transcendent wonder,’ a degree of wonder without limit and beyond expression!”
“It is always true that an encounter with God brings wonderment and awe!”
“It is delightful to worship God, but it is also a humbling thing; and the man who has not been humbled in the presence of God will never be a worshiper of God at all. He may be church member who keeps the rules and obeys the discipline, and who tithes and goes to conference, but he’ll never be a worshiper unless he is deeply humbling.”
“I can safely say, on the authority of all that is revealed in the Word of God, that any man or woman on this earth who is bored and turned off by worship is not ready for heaven.”
“In my opinion, the great single need of the moment is that light-hearted superficial religionists be struck down with a vision of God high and lifted up, with His train filling the temple. The holy art of worship seems to have passed away like the Shekinah glory from the tabernacle. As a result, we are left to our own devices and forced to make up the lack of spontaneous worship by bringing in countless cheap and tawdry activities to hold the attention of the church people.”
“I refer to the loss of the concept of majesty from the popular religious mind. The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshipping men. . . . With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine Presence. We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence.”
“Now we were made to worship, but the Scriptures tell us something else again. They tell us that man fell and kept not estate; that he forfeited the original glory of God and failed to fulfill the creative purpose, so that he is not worshipping now in the way that God meant him to worship. All else fulfills its design; flowers are still fragrant and lilies are still beautiful and the bees still search for nectar amongst the flowers; the birds still sing with their thousand voice choir on a summer’s day and the sun and the moon and the stars all move on their rounds doing the will of God.”
“And from what we can learn from the Scriptures we believe that the seraphim and cherubim and powers and dominions are still fulfilling their design – worshipping God who created them and breathed into them the breath of life. Man alone sulks in his cave. Man alone, with all of his brilliant intelligence, with all of his amazing, indescribable and wonderful equipment, still sulks in his cave. He is either silent, or if he opens his mouth at all, it is to boast and threaten and curse; or it’s nervous, ill-considered laughter, or it’s humor become big business, or it’s songs without joy.”
“Yes, worship of the loving God is man’s whole reason for existence. That is why we are born and that is why we are born again from above. That is why were created and recreated. That is why there was a genesis at the beginning re-genesis, called re-generation.”
“The purpose of God in sending His Son to die and rise and live and be at the right hand of God the Father was that He might restore to us the missing jewel, the jewel of worship; that we might come back and learn to do again that which we were created to do in the first place – worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, to spend our time in awesome wonder and adoration of God, feeling and expressing it, and letting it get into our labors and doing nothing except as an act of worship to Almighty God through His Son, Jesus Christ.”
“But a man who has passed the veil and looked even briefly upon the holy face of Isaiah’s God can never be irreverent again. There will be a reverence in his spirit and instead of boasting, he will cover his feet modestly.”
“But thinking is not enough. Men are made to worship also, to bow down and adore in the presence of the mystery inexpressible. Man’s mind is not the top pea, of his nature. Higher than his mind is his spirit, that something within him which can engage the supernatural, which under the breath of the Spirit can come alive and enter into conscious communion with heaven, can receive the divine nature and hear and feel and see the ineffable wonder that is God. . . . The wise of the world who have not learned to worship are but demi-men, unformed and rudimentary. Their further development awaits the life – giving touch of Christ to wake them to spiritual birth and life eternal.”
“Abraham was completely satisfied with God’s friendship. He becomes to us a faithful example in his willingness to put God first. With Abraham, only God mattered. . . . In Abraham’s encounter with God he learned why he was here upon earth. He was to Glorify God in all things and to continually worship.”
“There is a necessity for true worship among us. If God is who He says He is and if we are the believing people of God we claim to be, we must worship Him. . . . Oh, how I wish I could adequately set forth the glory of the One who is worthy to be the object of our worship! I do believe that if our new converts – the babes in Christ—could be made to see His thousand attributes and even partially comprehend His being, they would become faint with a yearning desire to worship and honor and acknowledge Him, now and forever.”
“God wants worshippers before workers; indeed the only acceptable workers are those who have learned the lost art of worship. It is inconceivable that a sovereign and holy God should be so hard up for workers that He would press into service anyone who had been empowered regardless of his moral qualifications. The very stones would praise Him if the need arose and a thousand legions of angels would leap to do His will. . . . Gifts and power for service the Spirit surely desires to impart; but holiness and spiritual worship come first.”
Worship
"I would consider pastoral malpractice among the greatest treasons a minister can commit against the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, it is practiced weekly without inhibition. What do I mean by pastoral malpractice? I mean ministers who stand and preach a gospel other than God's rightful need for punitive justice against our sin and His wrath being appeased by pouring out upon Christ judgment intended for us. He in turn sets us in right legal standing before Himself, through faith in what Jesus has done, while simultaneously giving to us His holy righteousness. Regrettably, too many evangelical churches have become centers for motivational speaking where congregants learn that "God helps those who help themselves;" that sin is something that keeps us from reaching our full potential, not an infinite offense against the Creator who demands from His creation unblemished righteousness." - Thom Rainer
Preaching
"The moment slothfulness begins, that moment dangers stand thick among us." - Anonymous Puritan Writer
Laziness
"No matter what the postmodern world concludes about God and truth, reality is that God is still God, and He is still trying to reconcile men unto Himself." - Dr. Sam Horn
"Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may distort it; but there it is." - Winston Churchill
"It is truth that passes into action that produces righteousness." - Richard Bennett
"To hear the truth and not accept it does not nullify truth." - Brotherhood Journal
"Truth is not ultimately a matter of pride or humility, it is a matter of fact." - Unknown
"Always tell the truth. Then you don't have to worry about what you said last." - Robert Cook
Truth
"God is God. Because He is God, He is worthy of my trust and obedience. I will find rest nowhere but in His holy will, a will that is unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what He is up to." - Elisabeth Elliot
Obedience
“Those who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.” - William Penn
“It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and Bible.” - George Washington
“This nation was founded on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.” - Patrick Henry
“We’ve staked our future on our ability to follow the Ten Commandments with all of our heart.” - James Madison
“I’ve been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.” - Abraham Lincoln
“The Bible is the rock upon which our republic rests.” - Andrew Jackson
“There is no national security but to the nation’s humble, acknowledged dependence upon God and His overruling providence.” - Franklin Pierce
“When you have read the Bible, you know it is the word of God because it is the key to your heart, your happiness, and your duty.” - Woodrow Wilson
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” - John Adams
“All the miseries and evils which men suffer from crime, injustice, depression, slavery, and war proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.” - Noah Webster
“Of the many influences that have shaped the United States, none may be said to be more fundamental and enduring than the Bible.” - Ronald Reagan
“Bibles are strong entrenchments. Where they abound, men cannot pursue wicked courses and at the same time enjoy quiet conscience.” - James McHenry
“We do not need material development; we need more spiritual development. We do not need more physical power; we need more moral power.” - Calvin Coolidge
Freedom