Sermon quotes on challenges

Stephen Covey

Opposition is a natural part of life. Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition – such as lifting weights – we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.

Richard Dahlstrom

Trials are the ruler and scale to reveal in our lives.

T. S. Eliot

If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

Viktor E. Frankl

When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.

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.

Leadership on the Line

Martin Luther King Jr.

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.

Moliere

The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.

Randy Pausch

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.

Alan Redpath

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.

Hudson Taylor

There are three stages to every great work of God: first it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done.

Henry Ward Beecher

Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.

Helen Keller

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.

 The Open Door

G.K. Chesterton

It is a mark of the essential morality of fairyland (a thing too commonly overlooked) that happiness, like happiness anywhere else, involves an object and even a challenge; we can only admire scenery if we want to get past it.

Orthodoxy

Max Lucado

Don’t get sucked into short-term thinking. Your struggles will not last forever, but you will.

God Will Carry You Through, Thomas Nelson, 2013, p.18.

Carl Jung

In the last resort it is highly improbable that there could ever be a therapy which gets rid of all difficulties. Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

Isak Dinesen

I think these difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way and that so many things that one goes around worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.

Albert Camus

In the midst of winter I discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Of all the virtues we can learn, no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.  

Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi

These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives. A person who has achieved control over psychic energy and has invested it in consciously chosen goals cannot help but grow into a more complex being. By stretching skills, by reaching toward higher challenges, such a person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual.

Paul David Tripp

God never calls you to a task without giving you what you need to do it. He never sends you without going with you.

Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family (Crossway, 2016).

Mark Twain

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

Following the Equator (1897)

Nicki Koziarz

Hard seasons can cause us to look at God in an unhealthy way. Instead of asking God what He needs us to see in these seasons, we may constantly find ourselves asking Him if He really knows what He is doing. It’s not our questions for God that lead to soul-unhealthiness, but rather our questioning of God.

Flooded: The 5 Best Decisions to Make When Life Is Hard and Doubt Is Rising, Bethany House Publishers, 2021.    

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