Achievement
It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
There is literally nothing that I ever asked to do, that I asked the blessed Creator to help me to do, that I have not been able to accomplish.
George Washington Carver
Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. And the one eternal lesson for us all is how better we can love.
Henry Drummond
I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
Helen Keller
Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.
Helen Keller
While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.
Helen Keller
We must use time creatively.
Martin Luther King Jr.
All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
C.S. Lewis
There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing.
George Macdonald
How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.
Florence Nightingale
You’re afraid? So what. Everybody’s afraid. Fear is the common ground of humanity. The question you must wrestle to the ground is, ‘Will I allow my fear to bind me to mediocrity?’
Nelson Searcy
Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual.
Charles Spurgeon
Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the altar of conformity and popularity.
Charles Spurgeon
Actions
The way you think determines the way you feel, and the way you feel determines the way you act.
Rick Warren
Adaptation
The improvisational ability to lead adaptively relies on responding to the present situation rather than importing the past into the present and laying it on the current situation like an imperfect template.
Ronald A. Heifetz
Adversity
Relational congruence is the ability to be fundamentally the same person with the same values in every relationship, in every circumstance and especially amidst crisis. It is the internal capacity to keep promises to God, to self and to one’s relationships that consistently express one’s identity and values in spiritually and emotionally healthy ways. Relational congruence is about both constancy and care at the same time. It is about both character and affection, and self-knowledge and authentic self-expression. Relational congruence is the leader’s ability to cultivate strong, healthy, caring relationships; maintaining healthy boundaries; and communicating clear expectations, all while staying focused on the mission.
Tod Bolsinger
Adversity is hard to endure, and can even be harder to understand. If God were really in control, why would He allow the tragic auto accident or crucial job loss? How could He permit cancer in a loved one or the death of a child? Grappling with His concern for us we ask, “Why is God allowing this?” or “What have I done wrong?
Jerry Bridges
Life asks not merely what you can do; it asks how much can you endure and not be spoiled.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
A pure heart won’t get us out of conflict and controversy. It may well be the very thing that gets us into it.
John Hagee
You know the adage “People resist change.” It is not really true. People are not stupid. People love change when they know it is a good thing. No one gives back a winning lottery ticket. What people resist is not change per se, but loss. When change involves real or potential loss, people hold on to what they have and resist the change.
Ronald A. Heifetz
A friend cannot be known in prosperity. An enemy cannot be hidden in adversity.
Jack Hyles
If you have no opposition in the place you serve, you’re serving in the wrong place.
Campbell Morgan
Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the altar of conformity and popularity.
Charles Spurgeon
Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual.
Charles Spurgeon
Adversity is not simply a tool. It is God’s most effective tool for the advancement of our spiritual lives. The circumstances and events that we see as setbacks are oftentimes the very things that launch us into periods of intense spiritual growth. Once we begin to understand this, and accept it as a spiritual fact of life, adversity becomes easier to bear.
Charles Stanley
Adversity is always unexpected and unwelcomed. It is an intruder and a thief, and yet in the hands of God, adversity becomes the means through which His supernatural power is demonstrated.
Charles Stanley
Assimilation
Not one person who comes through your door comes haphazardly. By sending that guest to you, God is giving you the privilege of cooperating with Him to move someone forward in their journey toward Jesus.
Nelson Searcy
Three first-time guests for every 100 attenders is the minimum number of guests that FCC, or any church, needs just to maintain consistency as people move away, join other churches or die. Five guests per 100 regular attenders usually signals a growing church, while 7 to 10 guests per 100 regular attenders would indicate rapid growth.
Nelson Searcy
Alcohol
Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence–religious meaning–apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.
Eugene Peterson
Attacks
When you take “personal” attacks personally, you unwittingly conspire in one of the common ways you can be taken out of action-you make yourself the issue. Attacks may be personal, understand that they are basically attacks on positions you represent and the role you are seeking to play”
Ronald A. Heifetz
Attitude
Attitude is an accurate monitor of where we fall on the spectrum of pride and humility.
Erwin McManus
Betrayal
Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone’s back.
Desmond Tutu
Beauty
The Christian gospel is rooted in language: God spoke a creation into being; our Savior was the Word made flesh. The poet is the person who uses words not primarily to convey information but to make a relationship, shape beauty, form truth…
Eugene Peterson
Blindness
Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Body
A faith without some doubts is like a human body with no antibodies in it.
Timothy Keller
Boredom
If you’re bored, one thing is for sure: You’re not following in the footsteps of Christ.
Mark Batterson
Business
The vocation of pastor(s) has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans.
Eugene Peterson
Calling
When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Let us think often that our only business in this life is to please God. Perhaps all besides is but folly and vanity.
Brother Lawrence
God does not choose those who are fit. He outfits those whom He chooses.
Jack Hyles
Go after a life of love as if your life depended on it—because it does.
Eugene Peterson
Challenges
Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.
Anonymous
You cannot expect people to seriously consider your idea without accepting the possibility that they will challenge it. Accepting that process of engagement as the terrain of leadership liberates you personally.
Ronald A. Heifetz
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Circumstances which we have resented, situations which we have found desperately difficult, have all been the means in the hands of God of driving the nails into the self-life which so easily complains.
Alan Redpath
Change
What people resist is not change per se, but loss.
Ronald A. Heifetz
You know the adage “People resist change.” It is not really true. People are not stupid. People love change when they know it is a good thing. No one gives back a winning lottery ticket. What people resist is not change per se, but loss. When change involves real or potential loss, people hold on to what they have and resist the change.
Ronald A. Heifetz
You cannot expect people to seriously consider your idea without accepting the possibility that they will challenge it. Accepting that process of engagement as the terrain of leadership liberates you personally.
Ronald A. Heifetz
When you lead people through difficult change, you take them on an emotional roller coaster because you are asking them to relinquish something—a belief, a value, a behavior—that they hold dear. People can stand only so much change at any one time.
Ronald A. Heifetz
The improvisational ability to lead adaptively relies on responding to the present situation rather than importing the past into the present and laying it on the current situation like an imperfect template.
Ronald A. Heifetz
The challenge of leadership when trying to generate adaptive change is to work with differences, passions, and conflicts in a way that diminishes their destructive potential and constructively harnesses their energy.
Ronald A. Heifetz
In order to exercise leadership on that challenge, they had to go beyond what people expected of them, risk testing some relationships, and move themselves and their organizations into unfamiliar territory. They had to be coolly realistic and skilled at diagnosing their own resources and constraints, and make some necessary adaptations in their own preferred behaviors. And they needed to do the same coolheaded diagnosis for the situation: understand the underlying value conflicts embedded in the strategy of the organization or community, what and whose interests benefited from the status quo, and the political dynamics that both kept their organizations in their current equilibrium and offered some potential for catalyzing change.
Ronald A Heifetz, Marty Linsky, Alexander Grashow
Character
Relational congruence is the ability to be fundamentally the same person with the same values in every relationship, in every circumstance and especially amidst crisis. It is the internal capacity to keep promises to God, to self and to one’s relationships that consistently express one’s identity and values in spiritually and emotionally healthy ways. Relational congruence is about both constancy and care at the same time. It is about both character and affection, and self-knowledge and authentic self-expression. Relational congruence is the leader’s ability to cultivate strong, healthy, caring relationships; maintaining healthy boundaries; and communicating clear expectations, all while staying focused on the mission.
Tod Bolsinger
Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Attitude is an accurate monitor of where we fall on the spectrum of pride and humility.
Erwin McManus
Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the altar of conformity and popularity.
Charles Spurgeon
Christianity
Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
C.S. Lewis
Christians
Christians are like manure: spread them out and they help everything grow better, but keep them in one big pile and they stink horribly.
Francis Chan
The Church
Lack of repentance is the root cause of powerlessness in the church, in this materialistic, self-indulgent age. There can be no spiritual power in a non-repentant church.
Dietrich Bonheoffer
Church Growth
Three first-time guests for every 100 attenders is the minimum number of guests that FCC, or any church, needs just to maintain consistency as people move away, join other churches or die. Five guests per 100 regular attenders usually signals a growing church, while 7 to 10 guests per 100 regular attenders would indicate rapid growth.
Nelson Searcy
Circumstances
Our circumstances are not an accurate reflection of God’s goodness. Whether life is good or bad, God’s goodness, rooted in His character, is the same.
Helen Grace Lescheid
The more one probes the workings of an emotional life the more he will be convinced of its vacillation and undependability. No one should wonder that a child of God who walks by emotion rather than by spirit usually comports himself in a wavelike fashion. He bemoans his existence because it is so unstable.
Watchman Nee
Circumstances which we have resented, situations which we have found desperately difficult, have all been the means in the hands of God of driving the nails into the self-life which so easily complains.
Alan Redpath
Comfort
When life caves in, you do not need reasons – you need comfort. You do not need some answers – you need someone. Jesus does not come to us with an explanation – He comes to us with His presence.
Bob Benson
Communication
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting system, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.
George Washington Carver
Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.
Margaret Miller
Comparison
It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.
Steven Furtick
Compassion
Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.
Francis Schaeffer
Concern
Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.
Abraham Lincoln
Conflict
Nothing so clearly discovers a spiritual man as his treatment of an erring brother.
St. Augustine
Never let a good crisis go to waste
Winston Churchill (Maybe?)
If we do anything to further the kingdom of God, we may expect to find what Christ found on that road – abuse, indifference, injustice, misunderstanding, trouble of some kind. Take it. Why not? To that you were called. In Latin America someone who feels sorry for himself is said to look like a donkey in a downpour. If we think of the glorious fact that we are on the same path with Jesus, we might see a rainbow.
Elisabeth Elliot
The challenge of leadership when trying to generate adaptive change is to work with differences, passions, and conflicts in a way that diminishes their destructive potential and constructively harnesses their energy.
Ronald A. Heifetz
A pure heart won’t get us out of conflict and controversy. It may well be the very thing that gets us into it.
John Hagee
When you take “personal” attacks personally, you unwittingly conspire in one of the common ways you can be taken out of action-you make yourself the issue. Attacks may be personal, understand that they are basically attacks on positions you represent and the role you are seeking to play”
Ronald A. Heifetz
In order to exercise leadership on that challenge, they had to go beyond what people expected of them, risk testing some relationships, and move themselves and their organizations into unfamiliar territory. They had to be coolly realistic and skilled at diagnosing their own resources and constraints, and make some necessary adaptations in their own preferred behaviors. And they needed to do the same coolheaded diagnosis for the situation: understand the underlying value conflicts embedded in the strategy of the organization or community, what and whose interests benefited from the status quo, and the political dynamics that both kept their organizations in their current equilibrium and offered some potential for catalyzing change.
Ronald A Heifetz, Marty Linsky, Alexander Grashow
Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional.
Max Lucado
If you have no opposition in the place you serve, you’re serving in the wrong place.
Campbell Morgan
The sight of any trouble strikes terror into the heart of those who do not have faith, but those who trust Him say, “Here comes my food!”
Watchman Nee
We build too many walls and not enough bridges.
Isaac Newton
Adversity is not simply a tool. It is God’s most effective tool for the advancement of our spiritual lives. The circumstances and events that we see as setbacks are oftentimes the very things that launch us into periods of intense spiritual growth. Once we begin to understand this, and accept it as a spiritual fact of life, adversity becomes easier to bear.
Charles Stanley
Conscience
A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
Steven Wright
Contentment
Whoever is not satisfied with Christ alone, strives after something beyond absolute perfection.
John Calvin
Context
No text can be understood out of its entire context. The most “entire” context is Jesus. Every biblical text must be read in the living presence of Jesus. Every word of the scriptural text is a window or door leading us out of the tarpaper shacks of self into this great outdoors of God’s revelation.
Eugene Peterson
Control
Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.
Margaret Miller
I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God’s business.
Eugene Peterson
Conversation
Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.
Margaret Miller
Creation
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting system, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.
George Washington Carver
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
Wendell Berry
God is the Friend of Silence. See How Nature … Trees, Flowers, Grass… Grow in Silence.
Mother Teresa
Crisis
Never let a good conflict go to waste
Winston Churchill (Maybe?)
Darkness
Never doubt in the dark what God told you in the light
Raymond Edman
Deception
Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Decision-Making
Wisdom is the power to see and the inclination to choose the best and highest goal, together with the surest means of attaining it.
J.I. Packer
Depression
Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual.
Charles Spurgeon
Devil
It is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless.
Donald Miller
Direction
I will go anywhere, provided it is forward.
David Livingstone
Discernment
It is easier to find guides, someone to tell you what to do, than someone to be with you in a discerning, prayerful companionship as you work it out yourself. This is what spiritual direction is.
Eugene Peterson
Discipleship
If you’re bored, one thing is for sure: You’re not following in the footsteps of Christ.
Mark Batterson
Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Christian belongs not in the seclusion of cloistered life but in the thick of foes.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Let us think often that our only business in this life is to please God. Perhaps all besides is but folly and vanity.
Brother Lawrence
God always gives his best to those who leave the choice with him.
Jim Elliot
It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.
Francis of Assisi
Your prayer for someone may or may not change them, but it always changes YOU.
Billy Graham
When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.
Craig Groeschel
If we’re going to impact our world in the name of Jesus, it will be because people like you and me took action in the power of the Spirit. Ever since the mission and ministry of Jesus, God has never stopped calling for a movement of “Little Jesuses” to follow him into the world and unleash the remarkable redemptive genius that lies in the very message we carry. Given the situation of the Church in the West, much will now depend on whether we are willing to break out of a stifling herd instinct and find God again in the context of the advancing kingdom of God.
Alan Hirsch
Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying.
And hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion or fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain. It means a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do. It is imagination put in the harness of faith. It is a willingness to let God do it his way and in his time. It is the opposite of making plans that we demand that God put into effect, telling him both how and when to do it. That is not hoping in God but bullying God. “I pray to GOD-my life a prayer-and wait for what he’ll say and do. My life’s on the line before God, my Lord, waiting and watching till morning, waiting and watching till morning.”
Timothy Keller
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
C.S. Lewis
Pride must die in you or nothing of heaven can live in you.
Andrew Murray
God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives.
J.I. Packer
[Jesus] said “Follow me” and ended up with a lot of losers. And these losers ended up, through no virtue or talent of their own, becoming saints. Jesus wasn’t after the best but the worst.
Eugene H. Peterson
He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.
Eugene Peterson
Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.
Eugene Peterson
To follow Jesus implies that we enter into a way of life that is given character and shape and direction by the one who calls us. To follow Jesus means picking up rhythms and ways of doing things that are often unsaid but always derivative from Jesus, formed by the influence of Jesus. To follow Jesus means that we can’t separate what Jesus is saying from what Jesus is doing and the way that he is doing it. To follow Jesus is as much, or maybe even more, about feet as it is about ears and eyes
Eugene Peterson
The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at the …moment.
Eugene Peterson
There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.
Eugene Peterson
Before Jeremiah knew God, God knew Jeremiah: “Before I shaped you in the womb, I knew all about you.” This turns everything we ever thought about God around. We think that God is an object about which we have questions. We are curious about God. We make inquiries about God. We read books about God. We get into late-night bull sessions about God. We drop into church from time to time to see what is going on with God. We indulge in an occasional sunset or symphony to cultivate a feeling of reverence for God. But that is not the reality of our lives with God. Long before we ever got around to asking questions about God, God had been questioning us. Long before we got interested in the subject of God, God subjected us to the most intensive and searching knowledge. Before it ever crossed our minds that God might be important, God singled us out as important. Before we were formed in the womb, God knew us. We are known before we know. This realization has a practical result: no longer do we run here and there, panicked and anxious, searching for the answers to life. Our lives are not puzzles to be figured out. Rather, we come to God, who knows us and reveals to us the truth of our lives. The fundamental mistake is to begin with ourselves and not God. God is the center from which all life develops. If we use our ego as the center from which to plot the geometry of our lives, we will live eccentrically.
Eugene Peterson
The will of God will not take us where the grace of God cannot sustain us.
Eugene Peterson
The way of Jesus cannot be imposed or mapped — it requires an active participation in following Jesus as he leads us through sometimes strange and unfamiliar territory, in circumstances that become clear only in the hesitations and questionings, in the pauses and reflections where we engage in prayerful conversation with one another and with him.
Eugene Peterson
A good journey begins with knowing where you are and being willing to go somewhere else.
Richard Rohr
Discipline
The grace that brought salvation to you is the same grace that teaches or disciplines you. But you must respond on the basis of grace, not law.
Jerry Bridges
Discouragement
Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual.
Charles Spurgeon
Distraction
It is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless.
Donald Miller
Doctrine
Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.
Francis Schaeffer
Doubt
Never doubt in the dark what God told you in the light
Raymond Edman
A faith without some doubts is like a human body with no antibodies in it.
Timothy Keller
All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.
Eugene Peterson
Dreams
If you want to build a ship, don’t summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
We care more for our possessions with which we hope to make our way in the world than with our thoughts and dreams which tell us who we are in the world.
Eugene Peterson
Drugs
Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence–religious meaning–apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.
Eugene Peterson
Dust
The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word ‘humble.’ This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust – dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.
Eugene Peterson
Election
Imagine a president who was elected who spent all his time talking about his election…he ordered studies on how he was elected…people wouldn’t be happy…right, you are elected to do something…it’s the same thing with our own election.
Richard Mouw
Emotions
When you lead people through difficult change, you take them on an emotional roller coaster because you are asking them to relinquish something—a belief, a value, a behavior—that they hold dear. People can stand only so much change at any one time.
Ronald A. Heifetz
In the heat of leadership, with the adrenaline pumping, it is easy to convince yourself that you are not subject to the normal human frailties that can defeat ordinary mortals. You begin to act as if you are indestructible. But the intellectual, physical, and emotional challenges of leadership are fierce. So, in addition to getting on the being and assess the tolls those changes are taking. If you don’t, your seemingly indestructible self can self-destruct. This, by the way, is an ideal outcome for your foes-and even friends who oppose your initiative- because no one has to feel responsible for your downfall.
Ronald A. Heifetz
Faith isn’t a feeling; it’s a choice to trust God even when the road ahead seems uncertain.
Toby Mckeehan
The more one probes the workings of an emotional life the more he will be convinced of its vacillation and undependability. No one should wonder that a child of God who walks by emotion rather than by spirit usually comports himself in a wavelike fashion. He bemoans his existence because it is so unstable.
Watchman Nee
A genuine leader will never exploit your emotions or your pocketbook.
Eugene Peterson
The way you think determines the way you feel, and the way you feel determines the way you act.
Rick Warren
Empathy
Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .
C.S. Lewis
Experience
Experience is overrated. Some people say they have twenty years’ experience, when, in reality, they only have one year’s experience, repeated twenty times.”
Stephen R Covey
Ethics
Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.
Wendell Berry
Evangelism
Speaking to people does not have the same personal intensity as listening to them. The question I put to myself is not ‘How many people have you spoken to about Christ this week?’ but ‘How many people have you listened to in Christ this week?
Eugene Peterson
Eyes
Prayer is the difference between seeing with our physical eyes and seeing with our spiritual eyes.
Mark Batterson
Existence
Faith is seeing the invisible, but not the nonexistent.
A.W. Tozer
Expectations
Leadership is often a matter of failing people’s expectations at a rate they can stand.
Ronald Heifetz
Failure
Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.
Francis Chan
Failure isn’t final until you quit!
Steven Furtick
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
C.S. Lewis
Faith
A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
What are you doing right now that requires faith?
Francis Chan
Never doubt in the dark what God told you in the light
Raymond Edman
Faith is not the belief that God will do what you want. It is the belief that God will do what is right.
Max Lucado
Faith isn’t a feeling; it’s a choice to trust God even when the road ahead seems uncertain.
Toby Mckeehan
The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at the …moment.
Eugene Peterson
Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying.
And hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion or fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain. It means a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do. It is imagination put in the harness of faith. It is a willingness to let God do it his way and in his time. It is the opposite of making plans that we demand that God put into effect, telling him both how and when to do it. That is not hoping in God but bullying God. “I pray to GOD-my life a prayer-and wait for what he’ll say and do. My life’s on the line before God, my Lord, waiting and watching till morning, waiting and watching till morning.”
Eugene Peterson
Unless there is an element of risk in our exploits for God, there is no need for faith.
Hudson Taylor
Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.
Corrie Ten Boom
Faith is seeing the invisible, but not the nonexistent.
A.W. Tozer
Fear
Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.
Donald Miller
The sight of any trouble strikes terror into the heart of those who do not have faith, but those who trust Him say, “Here comes my food!”
Watchman Nee
How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.
Florence Nightingale
You’re afraid? So what. Everybody’s afraid. Fear is the common ground of humanity. The question you must wrestle to the ground is, ‘Will I allow my fear to bind me to mediocrity?’
Nelson Searcy
A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only take a short cut to meet it.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Fallacies
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
G.K. Chesterton
Fellowship
Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .
C.S. Lewis
Our love to God is measured by our everyday fellowship with others and the love it displays.
Andrew Murray
Forgiveness
The man who refuses to forgive destroys the bridge over which he himself must cross.
John Irving
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
C.S. Lewis
Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.
C.S. Lewis
By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am.
Philip Yancey
Friendship
Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .
C.S. Lewis
Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what’s common in human experience and turns it into something holy.
Eugene Peterson
Fruit of the Spirit
Peace is a fruit of the Spirit, not a byproduct of accumulated wealth.
Andy Stanley
Gardening
Christians are like manure: spread them out and they help everything grow better, but keep them in one big pile and they stink horribly.
Francis Chan
The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word ‘humble.’ This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust – dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.
Eugene Peterson
Gifts
God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them.
St. Augustine
Grace is a gift that costs everything for the giver and nothing for the recipient.
Philip Yancey
God
Because God has made us for Himself, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.
St. Augustine
God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them.
St. Augustine
Nothing is too big for Him to handle, and nothing is too small to escape His attention.
Jerry Bridges
God always gives his best to those who leave the choice with him.
Jim Elliot
Our circumstances are not an accurate reflection of God’s goodness. Whether life is good or bad, God’s goodness, rooted in His character, is the same.
Helen Grace Lescheid
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
C.S. Lewis
Faith is not the belief that God will do what you want. It is the belief that God will do what is right.
Max Lucado
We should always use our weaknesses to point others to Christ’s strength.
Perry Noble
There is nothing we can do to make God love us more. There is nothing we can do to make God love us less.
Philip Yancey
God’s existence
A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
God’s Will
The will of God will not take us where the grace of God cannot sustain us.
Billy Graham
I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God’s business.
Eugene Peterson
Adversity is always unexpected and unwelcomed. It is an intruder and a thief, and yet in the hands of God, adversity becomes the means through which His supernatural power is demonstrated.
Charles Stanley
Gospel
The Christian gospel is rooted in language: God spoke a creation into being; our Savior was the Word made flesh. The poet is the person who uses words not primarily to convey information but to make a relationship, shape beauty, form truth…
Eugene Peterson
Grace
Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The grace that brought salvation to you is the same grace that teaches or disciplines you. But you must respond on the basis of grace, not law.
Jerry Bridges
The will of God will not take us where the grace of God cannot sustain us.
Billy Graham
The doctrines of grace humble a man without degrading him and exalt him without inflating him.
Charles Hodge
God loves you just as you are but too much to leave you that way.
Max Lucado
My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.
Brennan Manning
When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn’t go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.
Eugene Peterson
My job is not to solve people’s problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.
Eugene Peterson
When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn’t go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.
Eugene Peterson
There is nothing we can do to make God love us more. There is nothing we can do to make God love us less.
Philip Yancey
Grace is a gift that costs everything for the giver and nothing for the recipient.
Philip Yancey
Giving
No one has ever become poor by giving.
Anne Frank
Happiness
Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose … only [upon] the Beloved who will never pass away.
C.S. Lewis
We aim for happiness but we settle for pleasure…which is only momentary
Mark Oerter
Health
No change of job, no increased income, no new home, no new electronic device, or no new spouse is going to make things better inside of you.
Matt Chandler
Heart
Because God has made us for Himself, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.
St. Augustine
In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
John Bunyan
It’s your heart, not the dictionary, that gives meaning to your words.
Eugene Peterson
The word of God can be in the mind without being in the heart, but it cannot be in the heart without first being in the mind.
R.C. Sproul
Holiness
There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.
Eugene Peterson
Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what’s common in human experience and turns it into something holy.
Eugene Peterson
Holy Spirit
Without God’s Spirit, there is nothing we can do that will count for God’s kingdom.
N.T. Wright
Hope
Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying.
And hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion or fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain. It means a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do. It is imagination put in the harness of faith. It is a willingness to let God do it his way and in his time. It is the opposite of making plans that we demand that God put into effect, telling him both how and when to do it. That is not hoping in God but bullying God. “I pray to GOD-my life a prayer-and wait for what he’ll say and do. My life’s on the line before God, my Lord, waiting and watching till morning, waiting and watching till morning.”
Eugene Peterson
Hospitality
Hospitality means opening our lives, and our homes, to those who believe differently than we do.
Matt Chandler
Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.
Eugene Peterson
Not one person who comes through your door comes haphazardly. By sending that guest to you, God is giving you the privilege of cooperating with Him to move someone forward in their journey toward Jesus.
Nelson Searcy
Humanity
Attitude is an accurate monitor of where we fall on the spectrum of pride and humility.
Erwin McManus
The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word ‘humble.’ This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust – dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.
Eugene Peterson
Humility
The doctrines of grace humble a man without degrading him and exalt him without inflating him.
Charles Hodge
And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily–open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is better than succeeding in pride.
Eugene Peterson
Humor
George Harrison memorial tree, killed by beetles
L.A. Times
Hypocrisy
Truth without love is brutality, and love without truth is hypocrisy.
Warren W. Wiersbe
Ideas
You cannot expect people to seriously consider your idea without accepting the possibility that they will challenge it. Accepting that process of engagement as the terrain of leadership liberates you personally.
Ronald A. Heifetz
Idolatry
Whoever is not satisfied with Christ alone, strives after something beyond absolute perfection.
John Calvin
If you love anything more than God, even if you believe in God, if there’s anything in your life that’s more important to you than God, than it is a master in your life…it will continually say, ‘serve me or die
Timothy Keller
Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just. Such a God is an idol of your own.
J.C. Ryle
An idol is anything or anyone that receives my primary focus of both my energy and my resources, which should first of all, belong to God.
Mike Slaughter
The process of spiritual formation in Christ is one of progressively replacing . . . destructive images and ideas with the images and ideas that filled the mind of Jesus himself.
Dallas Willard
Insecurity
The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.
Steven Furtick
Inspiration
There is literally nothing that I ever asked to do, that I asked the blessed Creator to help me to do, that I have not been able to accomplish.
George Washington Carver
Irony
George Harrison memorial tree, killed by beetles
L.A. Times
Jesus
If we do anything to further the kingdom of God, we may expect to find what Christ found on that road – abuse, indifference, injustice, misunderstanding, trouble of some kind. Take it. Why not? To that you were called. In Latin America someone who feels sorry for himself is said to look like a donkey in a downpour. If we think of the glorious fact that we are on the same path with Jesus, we might see a rainbow.
Elisabeth Elliot
Journey
A good journey begins with knowing where you are and being willing to go somewhere else.
Richard Rohr
Judging
Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
Mother Teresa
Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just. Such a God is an idol of your own.
J.C. Ryle
Thus was the King and the Lord of glory judged by man’s judgment, when manifest in flesh: far be it from any of his ministers to expect better treatment.
George Whitefield
Justice
Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.
Wendell Berry
Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just. Such a God is an idol of your own.
J.C. Ryle
Kindness
Kindness is a language that deaf people can hear and that blind people can see.
Mark Twain
King
What is the main theme of Lord of the Rings? The world needs a king.
Timothy Keller
Kingdom of God
If we do anything to further the kingdom of God, we may expect to find what Christ found on that road – abuse, indifference, injustice, misunderstanding, trouble of some kind. Take it. Why not? To that you were called. In Latin America someone who feels sorry for himself is said to look like a donkey in a downpour. If we think of the glorious fact that we are on the same path with Jesus, we might see a rainbow.
Elisabeth Elliot
Without God’s Spirit, there is nothing we can do that will count for God’s kingdom.
N.T. Wright
Language
The Christian gospel is rooted in language: God spoke a creation into being; our Savior was the Word made flesh. The poet is the person who uses words not primarily to convey information but to make a relationship, shape beauty, form truth…
Eugene Peterson
Leadership
The challenge of leadership when trying to generate adaptive change is to work with differences, passions, and conflicts in a way that diminishes their destructive potential and constructively harnesses their energy.
Ronald A. Heifetz
You stay alive in the practice of leadership by reducing the extent to which you become the target of people’s frustrations. The best way to stay out of range is to think constantly about giving the work back to the people who need to take responsibility. Place the work within and between the factions who are faced with the challenge, and tailor your interventions so they are unambiguous and have a context.
Ronald A. Heifetz
In the heat of leadership, with the adrenaline pumping, it is easy to convince yourself that you are not subject to the normal human frailties that can defeat ordinary mortals. You begin to act as if you are indestructible. But the intellectual, physical, and emotional challenges of leadership are fierce. So, in addition to getting on the being and assess the tolls those changes are taking. If you don’t, your seemingly indestructible self can self-destruct. This, by the way, is an ideal outcome for your foes-and even friends who oppose your initiative- because no one has to feel responsible for your downfall.
Ronald A. Heifetz
The improvisational ability to lead adaptively relies on responding to the present situation rather than importing the past into the present and laying it on the current situation like an imperfect template.
Ronald A. Heifetz
In order to exercise leadership on that challenge, they had to go beyond what people expected of them, risk testing some relationships, and move themselves and their organizations into unfamiliar territory. They had to be coolly realistic and skilled at diagnosing their own resources and constraints, and make some necessary adaptations in their own preferred behaviors. And they needed to do the same coolheaded diagnosis for the situation: understand the underlying value conflicts embedded in the strategy of the organization or community, what and whose interests benefited from the status quo, and the political dynamics that both kept their organizations in their current equilibrium and offered some potential for catalyzing change.
Ronald A Heifetz, Marty Linsky, Alexander Grashow
A genuine leader will never exploit your emotions or your pocketbook.
Eugene H. Peterson
Life
There are two great days in a person’s life … the day we are born and the day we discover why.
William Barclay
Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. And the one eternal lesson for us all is how better we can love.
Henry Drummond
Life asks not merely what you can do; it asks how much can you endure and not be spoiled.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.
Donald Miller
The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at the …moment.
Eugene Peterson
Light
Never doubt in the dark what God told you in the light
V. Raymond Edman
Listening
When life caves in, you do not need reasons – you need comfort. You do not need some answers – you need someone. Jesus does not come to us with an explanation – He comes to us with His presence.
Bob Benson
Speaking to people does not have the same personal intensity as listening to them. The question I put to myself is not ‘How many people have you spoken to about Christ this week?’ but ‘How many people have you listened to in Christ this week?
Eugene Peterson
Little
I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
Helen Keller
Nothing is too big for Him to handle, and nothing is too small to escape His attention.
Jerry Bridges
There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing.
George Macdonald
God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself.
John Piper
Loss
What people resist is not change per se, but loss.
Ronald A. Heifetz
When you lead people through difficult change, you take them on an emotional roller coaster because you are asking them to relinquish something—a belief, a value, a behavior—that they hold dear. People can stand only so much change at any one time.
Ronald A. Heifetz
You know the adage “People resist change.” It is not really true. People are not stupid. People love change when they know it is a good thing. No one gives back a winning lottery ticket. What people resist is not change per se, but loss. When change involves real or potential loss, people hold on to what they have and resist the change.
Ronald A. Heifetz
Love
By loving us, God makes us lovable.
St. Augustine
Trust the past to God’s mercy, the present to God’s love and the future to God’s providence.
St. Augustine
Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. And the one eternal lesson for us all is how better we can love.
Henry Drummond
Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.
Timothy Keller
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
C.S. Lewis
God loves you just as you are but too much to leave you that way.
Max Lucado
My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.
Brennan Manning
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
Mother Teresa
Our love to God is measured by our everyday fellowship with others and the love it displays.
Andrew Murray
Go after a life of love as if your life depended on it—because it does.
Eugene Peterson
And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily–open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is better than succeeding in pride.
Eugene Peterson
Truth without love is brutality, and love without truth is hypocrisy.
Warren W. Wiersbe
There is nothing we can do to make God love us more. There is nothing we can do to make God love us less.
Philip Yancey
Lukewarm
Lukewarm people don’t really want to be saved from their sin; they want only to be saved from the penalty of their sin.
Francis Chan
Materialism
Lack of repentance is the root cause of powerlessness in the church, in this materialistic, self-indulgent age. There can be no spiritual power in a non-repentant church.
Dietrich Bonheoffer
Meaning
Because God has made us for Himself, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.
St. Augustine
There are two great days in a person’s life … the day we are born and the day we discover why.
William Barclay
Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence–religious meaning–apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.
Eugene Peterson
Mediocrity
You’re afraid? So what. Everybody’s afraid. Fear is the common ground of humanity. The question you must wrestle to the ground is, ‘Will I allow my fear to bind me to mediocrity?’
Nelson Searcy
Maturity
Immaturity talks when it should listen, and is silent when it should speak.
Matt Chandler
Mercy
Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just. Such a God is an idol of your own.
J.C. Ryle
Trust the past to God’s mercy, the present to God’s love and the future to God’s providence.
Augustine
By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am.
Philip Yancey
Mind
The word of God can be in the mind without being in the heart, but it cannot be in the heart without first being in the mind.
R.C. Sproul
Ministry
Christian Leaders: You were trained for a world that is disappearing.
Tod Bolsinger
A genuine leader will never exploit your emotions or your pocketbook.
Eugene H. Peterson
The vocation of pastor(s) has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans.
Eugene Peterson
Misunderstanding
If we do anything to further the kingdom of God, we may expect to find what Christ found on that road – abuse, indifference, injustice, misunderstanding, trouble of some kind. Take it. Why not? To that you were called. In Latin America someone who feels sorry for himself is said to look like a donkey in a downpour. If we think of the glorious fact that we are on the same path with Jesus, we might see a rainbow.
Elisabeth Elliot
Money
No change of job, no increased income, no new home, no new electronic device, or no new spouse is going to make things better inside of you.
Matt Chandler
A genuine leader will never exploit your emotions or your pocketbook.
Eugene H. Peterson
We care more for our possessions with which we hope to make our way in the world than with our thoughts and dreams which tell us who we are in the world.
Eugene Peterson
Motivation
Trouble and prayer are closely related. Trouble often drives men to God in prayer, while prayer is but the voice of men in trouble.
E.M. Bound
If you want to build a ship, don’t summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Obedience
When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
One step forward in obedience is worth years of study about it.
Oswald Chambers
What are you doing right now that requires faith?
Francis Chan
God always gives his best to those who leave the choice with him.
Jim Elliot
Great moves of God are usually preceded by simple acts of obedience.
Steven Furtick
Instant obedience is the only kind of obedience there is; delayed obedience is disobedience.
Thomas a Kempis
Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.
Abraham Lincoln
When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.
Eugene Peterson
Your religion is what you do with your solitude
William Temple
Offering
It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.
George Macdonal
Opportunity
Never let a good crisis go to waste
Winston Churchill (Maybe?)
Pastors
The vocation of pastor(s) has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans.
Eugene Peterson
Isn’t it odd that pastors, who are responsible for interpreting the Scriptures, so much of which come in the form of poetry, have so little interest in poetry? … Words create. God’s word creates; our words can participate in creation.
Eugene Peterson
Peace
If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.
Wendell Berry
If every man and woman in the world knew what it was to hunger and thirst after righteousness, there would be no danger of war.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Peace is a fruit of the Spirit, not a byproduct of accumulated wealth.
Andy Stanley
Perspective
God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself.
John Piper
Pleasure
We aim for happiness but we settle for pleasure…which is only momentary
Mark Oerter
Popularity
Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the altar of conformity and popularity.
Charles Spurgeon
Possessions
No change of job, no increased income, no new home, no new electronic device, or no new spouse is going to make things better inside of you.
Matt Chandler
We care more for our possessions with which we hope to make our way in the world than with our thoughts and dreams which tell us who we are in the world.
Eugene Peterson
Prayer
Prayer is the difference between seeing with our physical eyes and seeing with our spiritual eyes.
Mark Batterson
Trouble and prayer are closely related. Trouble often drives men to God in prayer, while prayer is but the voice of men in trouble.
E.M. Bounds
In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
John Bunyan
We have to pray with our eyes on God, not on the difficulties.
Oswald Chambers
There are walls that need to come down. You can pray unity but then you have to work unity by demonstrating what unity really looks like.
Ralph Douglas
Your prayer for someone may or may not change them, but it always changes YOU.
Craig Groeschel
Prayer does not merely consist in our speaking to God. It is not a monologue but rather a dialogue.
D. Edmond Hiebert
Pray, and let God worry.
Martin Luther
Practices
To follow Jesus implies that we enter into a way of life that is given character and shape and direction by the one who calls us. To follow Jesus means picking up rhythms and ways of doing things that are often unsaid but always derivative from Jesus, formed by the influence of Jesus. To follow Jesus means that we can’t separate what Jesus is saying from what Jesus is doing and the way that he is doing it. To follow Jesus is as much, or maybe even more, about feet as it is about ears and eyes
Eugene Peterson
President
Imagine a president who was elected who spent all his time talking about his election…he ordered studies on how he was elected…people wouldn’t be happy…right, you are elected to do something…it’s the same thing with our own election.
Richard Mouw
Pride
Attitude is an accurate monitor of where we fall on the spectrum of pride and humility.
Erwin McManus
Pride must die in you or nothing of heaven can live in you.
Andrew Murray
Priorities
Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.
Francis Chan
An idol is anything or anyone that receives my primary focus of both my energy and my resources, which should first of all, belong to God.
Mike Slaughter
Providence
Trust the past to God’s mercy, the present to God’s love and the future to God’s providence.
St. Augustine
Not one person who comes through your door comes haphazardly. By sending that guest to you, God is giving you the privilege of cooperating with Him to move someone forward in their journey toward Jesus.
Nelson Searcy
Anything under God’s control is never out of control.
Charles Swindoll
Pruning
Circumstances which we have resented, situations which we have found desperately difficult, have all been the means in the hands of God of driving the nails into the self-life which so easily complains.
Alan Redpath
Purity of heart
A pure heart won’t get us out of conflict and controversy. It may well be the very thing that gets us into it.
John Hagee
Purpose
There are two great days in a person’s life … the day we are born and the day we discover why.
William Barclay
Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. And the one eternal lesson for us all is how better we can love.
Henry Drummond
Quality
It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.
George Macdonald
Questioning God
Adversity is hard to endure, and can even be harder to understand. If God were really in control, why would He allow the tragic auto accident or crucial job loss? How could He permit cancer in a loved one or the death of a child? Grappling with His concern for us we ask, “Why is God allowing this?” or “What have I done wrong?
Jerry Bridges
Quitting
Failure isn’t final until you quit!
Steven Furtick
Relationships
Nothing so clearly discovers a spiritual man as his treatment of an erring brother.
St. Augustine
Religion
Your religion is what you do with your solitude
William Temple
Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone’s back.
Desmond Tutu
Repentance
Lack of repentance is the root cause of powerlessness in the church, in this materialistic, self-indulgent age. There can be no spiritual power in a non-repentant church.
Dietrich Bonheoffer
We can invent a God who forgives everybody without requiring repentance. All such avenues are established in delusion.
R.C Sproul
Responsibility
You stay alive in the practice of leadership by reducing the extent to which you become the target of people’s frustrations. The best way to stay out of range is to think constantly about giving the work back to the people who need to take responsibility. Place the work within and between the factions who are faced with the challenge, and tailor your interventions so they are unambiguous and have a context.
Ronald A. Heifetz
Resurrection
It is not easy to convey a sense of wonder, let alone resurrection wonder, to another. It’s the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard, to circumvent expectations and assumptions. Wonder can’t be packaged, and it can’t be worked up. It requires some sense of being there and some sense of engagement.
Eugene Peterson
Righteousness
If every man and woman in the world knew what it was to hunger and thirst after righteousness, there would be no danger of war.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Risk
Unless there is an element of risk in our exploits for God, there is no need for faith.
Hudson Taylor
Sacraments
Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what’s common in human experience and turns it into something holy.
Eugene Peterson
Sacrifice
When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.
George Macdonald
Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what’s common in human experience and turns it into something holy.
Eugene Peterson
Satan
It is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless.
Donald Miller
Self-Awareness
In the heat of leadership, with the adrenaline pumping, it is easy to convince yourself that you are not subject to the normal human frailties that can defeat ordinary mortals. You begin to act as if you are indestructible. But the intellectual, physical, and emotional challenges of leadership are fierce. So, in addition to getting on the being and assess the tolls those changes are taking. If you don’t, your seemingly indestructible self can self-destruct. This, by the way, is an ideal outcome for your foes-and even friends who oppose your initiative- because no one has to feel responsible for your downfall.
Ronald A. Heifetz
Scripture
Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.
Eugene Peterson
No text can be understood out of its entire context. The most “entire” context is Jesus. Every biblical text must be read in the living presence of Jesus. Every word of the scriptural text is a window or door leading us out of the tarpaper shacks of self into this great outdoors of God’s revelation.
Eugene Peterson
Isn’t it odd that pastors, who are responsible for interpreting the Scriptures, so much of which come in the form of poetry, have so little interest in poetry? … Words create. God’s word creates; our words can participate in creation.
Eugene Peterson
The word of God can be in the mind without being in the heart, but it cannot be in the heart without first being in the mind.
R.C. Sproul
Seas
Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.
Anonymous
Self-awareness
My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.
Brennan Manning
God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself.
John Piper
Self-control
We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.
Eugene Peterson
Security
All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.
Eugene Peterson
Service
Self-righteous service comes through human effort. True service comes from a relationship with the divine Other deep inside. Self-righteous service is impressed with the “big deal.” True service finds it almost impossible to distinguish the small from the large service. Self-righteous service requires external rewards. True service rests contented in hiddenness. Self-righteous service is highly concerned about results. True service is free of the need to calculate results. Self-righteous service is affected by moods and whims. True service ministers simply and faithfully because there is a need. Self-righteous service is temporary. True service is a life-style. Self-righteous service fractures community. True service, on the other hand, builds community.” True service, on the other hand, builds community.
Richard Foster
The idea that the service to God should have only to do with a church altar, singing, reading, sacrifice, and the like is without doubt but the worst trick of the devil.
Martin Luther
God is not looking for people to work for Him but people who let Him work mightily in and through them.
John Piper
Sex
Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence–religious meaning–apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.
Eugene Peterson
Sight
Prayer is the difference between seeing with our physical eyes and seeing with our spiritual eyes.
Mark Batterson
The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.
Helen Keller
Wisdom is the power to see and the inclination to choose the best and highest goal, together with the surest means of attaining it.
J.I. Packer
Signs
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
C.S. Lewis
Silence
Immaturity talks when it should listen, and is silent when it should speak.
Matt Chandler
Soil
The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word ‘humble.’ This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust – dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.
Eugene Peterson
Speech
Immaturity talks when it should listen, and is silent when it should speak.
Matt Chandler
It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.
Francis of Assisi
We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.
Eugene Peterson
Sin
Lukewarm people don’t really want to be saved from their sin; they want only to be saved from the penalty of their sin.
Francis Chan
When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn’t go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.
Eugene Peterson
A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
Steven Wright
Solitude
Your religion is what you do with your solitude
William Temple
Speech
Immaturity talks when it should listen, and is silent when it should speak.
Matt Chandler
We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.
Eugene Peterson
Spiritual Direction
My job is not to solve people’s problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.
Eugene Peterson
It is easier to find guides, someone to tell you what to do, than someone to be with you in a discerning, prayerful companionship as you work it out yourself. This is what spiritual direction is.
Eugene Peterson
Spiritual Growth
Christians are like manure: spread them out and they help everything grow better, but keep them in one big pile and they stink horribly.
Francis Chan
Your prayer for someone may or may not change them, but it always changes YOU.
Craig Groeschel
Adversity is not simply a tool. It is God’s most effective tool for the advancement of our spiritual lives. The circumstances and events that we see as setbacks are oftentimes the very things that launch us into periods of intense spiritual growth. Once we begin to understand this, and accept it as a spiritual fact of life, adversity becomes easier to bear.
Charles Stanley
Status Quo
In order to exercise leadership on that challenge, they had to go beyond what people expected of them, risk testing some relationships, and move themselves and their organizations into unfamiliar territory. They had to be coolly realistic and skilled at diagnosing their own resources and constraints, and make some necessary adaptations in their own preferred behaviors. And they needed to do the same coolheaded diagnosis for the situation: understand the underlying value conflicts embedded in the strategy of the organization or community, what and whose interests benefited from the status quo, and the political dynamics that both kept their organizations in their current equilibrium and offered some potential for catalyzing change
Ronald A Heifetz, Marty Linsky, Alexander Grashow
Stewardship
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
Wendell Berry
Spiritual Formation
The process of spiritual formation in Christ is one of progressively replacing . . . destructive images and ideas with the images and ideas that filled the mind of Jesus himself.
Dallas Willard
Story
When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.
Eugene Peterson
Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.
Eugene Peterson
Success
Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.
Francis Chan
Suffering
God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives.
J.I. Packer
Target
You stay alive in the practice of leadership by reducing the extent to which you become the target of people’s frustrations. The best way to stay out of range is to think constantly about giving the work back to the people who need to take responsibility. Place the work within and between the factions who are faced with the challenge, and tailor your interventions so they are unambiguous and have a context.
Ronald A. Heifetz
Technology
No change of job, no increased income, no new home, no new electronic device, or no new spouse is going to make things better inside of you.
Matt Chandler
Teamwork
Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.
Helen Keller
Testing
Nothing so clearly discovers a spiritual man as his treatment of an erring brother.
St. Augustine
Thought
The way you think determines the way you feel, and the way you feel determines the way you act.
Rick Warren
Time
Everything has its time and the main thing is that we keep in step with God and do not keep pressing on a few steps ahead-nor keep dawdling a few steps behind.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We must use time creatively.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Training
Christian Leaders: You were trained for a world that is disappearing.
Tod Bolsinger
Trouble
Trouble and prayer are closely related. Trouble often drives men to God in prayer, while prayer is but the voice of men in trouble.
E.M. Bounds
Trust
Faith isn’t a feeling; it’s a choice to trust God even when the road ahead seems uncertain.
Toby Mckeehan
The sight of any trouble strikes terror into the heart of those who do not have faith, but those who trust Him say, “Here comes my food!”
Watchman Nee
Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.
Corrie Ten Boom
Truth
A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Truth without love is brutality, and love without truth is hypocrisy.
Warren W. Wiersbe
Uncertainty
The way of Jesus cannot be imposed or mapped — it requires an active participation in following Jesus as he leads us through sometimes strange and unfamiliar territory, in circumstances that become clear only in the hesitations and questionings, in the pauses and reflections where we engage in prayerful conversation with one another and with him.
Eugene Peterson
Unity
There are walls that need to come down. You can pray unity but then you have to work unity by demonstrating what unity really looks like.
Ralph Douglas
War
If every man and woman in the world knew what it was to hunger and thirst after righteousness, there would be no danger of war.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Wealth
Peace is a fruit of the Spirit, not a byproduct of accumulated wealth.
Andy Stanley
Weakness
God does not choose those who are fit. He outfits those whom He chooses.
Jack Hyles
We should always use our weaknesses to point others to Christ’s strength.
Perry Noble
God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives.
J.I. Packer
[Jesus] said “Follow me” and ended up with a lot of losers. And these losers ended up, through no virtue or talent of their own, becoming saints. Jesus wasn’t after the best but the worst.
Eugene H. Peterson
Wisdom
Wisdom is the power to see and the inclination to choose the best and highest goal, together with the surest means of attaining it.
J.I. Packer
Wonder
It is not easy to convey a sense of wonder, let alone resurrection wonder, to another. It’s the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard, to circumvent expectations and assumptions. Wonder can’t be packaged, and it can’t be worked up. It requires some sense of being there and some sense of engagement.
Eugene Peterson
Words
In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
John Bunyan
It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.
Francis of Assisi
It’s your heart, not the dictionary, that gives meaning to your words.
Eugene Peterson
Work
All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
Martin Luther King Jr.
It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.
George Macdonald
Worldview
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
C.S. Lewis
Worry
Pray, and let God worry.
Martin Luther
Worship
What is the main theme of Lord of the Rings? The world needs a king.
Timothy Keller