"We don't have a clue as to what people's limits are. All the tests, stopwatches, and finish lines in the world can't measure human potential. When someone is pursuing their dream, they'll go far beyond what seem to be their limitations. The potential that exists within us is limitless and largely untapped…When you think of limits, you create them." - Robert Kriegel & Louis Patler
Limitations
"So I say to you, seek God and discover Him and make Him a power in your life. Without Him all of our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises into darkest nights. Without Him life is a meaningless drama with the decisive scenes missing. But with Him we are able to rise from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. With Him we are able to rise from the midnight of desperation to the daybreak of joy. St. Augustine was right - we were made for God and we will be restless until we find rest in Him." - Martin Luther King, Jr., in The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr., compiled by Coretta Scott King
"Remember - Christianity proposes not to extinguish our natural desires. It promises to bring the desires under just control and direct them to their true object. In the case of both riches and of honor, it maintains the consistency of its character. But Christianity commands us not to set our hearts on earthly treasures. It reminds us that 'we have in heaven a better and more enduring substance' than this world can bestow (Heb. 10:34)." - William Wilberforce in Real Christianity
"Holy Spirit, think through me till your ideas are my ideas". - Amy Carmichael in The Doubleday Prayer Collection
"For one who has made thanksgiving the habit of his life, the morning prayer will be, 'Lord, what will you give me today to offer back to you?'" - Elisabeth Elliot in Love Has a Price Tag
"We and Christianity are the same in one thing only: We demand the entire person!" - Nazi Judge Roland Freisler quoted in For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler, by Victoria Barnett
"He who loves God with all his heart dreads neither death, torment, judgment, nor hell, for perfect love opens a sure passage to God." - Thomas a Kempis in The Imitation of Christ
"If we can live one day with Jesus, we can live life every day with Him, each one as it comes. Immanuel, a name for Christ, means 'God with us.' Human life was meant to be dramatic. We are meant to be God-inhabited. Our religion is not organized around keeping God at a distance. It allows us to go see him when we want. If I really want God to be with me, then my life will be extremely different from ordinary human life. The outcome will be far greater than the efforts." - Ingrid Trobisch in The Confident Woman
Lordship
"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
"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
"Today is mine. Tomorrow is none of my business. If I peer anxiously into the fog of the future, I will strain my spiritual eyes so that I will not see clearly what is required of me now." - Elisabeth Elliott in Keep a Quiet Heart
"It is precisely because of the eternity outside time that everything in time becomes valuable and important and meaningful. Therefore, Christianity…makes it of urgent importance that everything we do here (whether individually or as a society) should be rightly related to what we eternally are. 'Eternal life' is the sole sanction for the values of this life. - Dorothy L. Sayers in Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul" - Christianity Today: Oct. 6, 1997
"Although the threads of my life have often seemed knotted, I know, by faith, that on the other side of the embroidery there is a crown." - Corrie Ten Boom in My Heart Sings
"A pastor was preaching on going to heaven. He said, 'How many of you would like to go to heaven tonight?' And everybody raised their hands but a little boy in the balcony. He tried again, 'How many of you would like to go to heaven?' Everybody but that one little fellow in the balcony. So he said to him, 'Son, don't you want to go to heaven?' The little boy said, 'Yeah, someday, but I thought you were gettin' up a load right now.'" - James Hewett, Illustrations Unlimiteda
Eternity
"Those that try the hardest, work the hardest, and put in the longest hours when necessary usually pull ahead of the pack just out of sheer effort." - F. Lee Bailey, First Draft, April 1998
"That which we obtain too easily we esteem too lightly." - Thomas Paine
Effort
"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book." - Groucho Marx, 1890-1977
"What is killing us is having to teach them to read, compute... and to think." - IBM chief Louis Gerstner on the need for educated workers
"Education - the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the ages - purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility. For the most part it serves to enlarge stupidity, inflate conceit, enhance credulity, and put those subjected to it at the mercy of brainwashers with printing presses, radio, and television at their disposal." - Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered
Education
"Whatever it was that occurred after Jesus' crucifixion, one thing is absolutely clear: It was called 'resurrection.' Of that there can be no doubt. All who were met by it called it the same thing. However unclear many things may be about alleged meetings with Jesus after his death, there was a consensus in the community that whatever it was that people were experiencing, the correct term for it was resurrection. This meant that they had experienced and tasted the first fruits of the expected event at the end time of judgment and redemption." - "Thomas C. Oden in Agenda for Theology After Modernity... What?" - Christianity Today: April 2, 1998
"'Oh, you're real! Oh, Aslan!' cried Lucy and both girls flung themselves upon him and covered him with kisses.
'But what does it all mean?' asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer.
'It means,' said Aslan, 'that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards. - C.S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" - Christianity Today, April 6, 1998"It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things; but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion." - C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity
Easter
"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