Sermon quotes on Christians
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Christian belongs not in the seclusion of cloistered life but in the thick of foes.
Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community
Francis Chan
Christians are like manure: spread them out and they help everything grow better, but keep them in one big pile and they stink horribly.
John Langdon-Davies
Those who have to be ordered to love God usually believe that obedience involves those excluding all other loves, to the extent of hating the world, the flesh, and even the self. We therefore find among Christians an inordinate number of haters of life eager to be ordered to love God frigidly and with a stiff upper lip, because, in the first place, they hate the world, the flesh, and themselves.
Jen Hatmaker
A Christian in tune with God’s whole character neither regards herself as too important or too unworthy to enjoy this life. Yes, we are part of God’s plan to heal the world, but we are also sons and daughters in the family. We are not just the distributors of God’s abundant mercies but also their recipients.
E.L. Mascall
The Christian is a man to whom something has happened.
Blaise Pascal
The Christian religion, then, teaches men these two truths; that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him.
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.
Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
A.W. Tozer
All great Christians have been wounded souls.
Oscar Wilde
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
Dallas Willard
It is now generally recognized that the question, “Am I a Christian?” can no longer be answered in any significant manner by citing denominational, ethnic, or national names or symbols. There are now 33,800 different Christian denominations on earth. Clearly, an answer must go deeper than our religious associations. It must refer to what we are in our heart—before God, in the depths of our being, always the focal point of Christian spiritual formation.
Source Unknown
Most people I meet assume that Christian means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, anti-gay, anti-choice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders; they want to convert everyone, and they generally cannot live peacefully with anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe.
Dallas Willard
The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes—a time for men and women to be heroic in their faith and in spiritual character and power.
Scot McKnight
We have too many Christians who have accepted Jesus into their hearts and who have been baptized and who have confessed their sins and who have joined the Church and who are in Bible studies and who are absolutely 100 percent convinced they are going to heaven, but who are not followers of Jesus.
J.I. Packer
The Christian’s life in all its aspects—intellectual and ethical, devotional and relational, upsurging in worship and outgoing in witness—is supernatural; only the Spirit can initiate and sustain it.
Jeff Vanderstelt
The mission of Jesus is yours to participate in. It has always been God’s intention to choose normal, everyday people, and to show his amazing power and glory through them. He’s not looking for the most impressive person because he already is that person.
Saturate: Being Disciples of Jesus in the Everyday Stuff of Life
François Fénelon
To just read the Bible, attend church, and avoid “big” sins—
is this passionate, wholehearted love for God?
Philip Yancey
Christians are not mere wayfarers en route to the next life, but rather pioneers of God’s kingdom in advance, a sign of what will follow. By living out lives of grace in a spoiled environment, we point forward to a time of restoration.
J.I. Packer
The Christian’s life in all its aspects—intellectual and ethical, devotional and relational, upsurging in worship and outgoing in witness—is supernatural; only the Spirit can initiate and sustain it.
Jen Pollock Michel
A solitary Christian who thinks he can live independently of the church functions about as well as a thumb severed from its hand.
Samuel Rutherford
My Lord Jesus can hew heaven out of worse timber than I am.
Karl Barth
Union with Christ is the starting-point for everything else to be thought and said concerning what makes the Christian a Christian.
Church Dogmatics, vol. 4, part 3.2, “The Doctrine of Reconciliation” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 549.
J.I. Packer
The Christian’s life in all its aspects—intellectual and ethical, devotional and relational, upsurging in worship and outgoing in witness—is supernatural; only the Spirit can initiate and sustain it.
Ronald Knox
Throughout two thousand years of history, Christians, both whole churches and individual believers, have consistently been able to ignore many of Jesus’ key commandments and invitations. We have either been too weak to follow his counsels or we have rationalized them away in some way.
Taken from Robert Barron, The Eucharist, 10.
Christian Wiman
I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?…The point is that he felt human destitution to its absolute degree; the point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.
My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013), 155.
Martin Luther
Thus a Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism, begun once and continuing ever after. For we must keep at it without ceasing, always purging whatever pertains to the old Adam, so that whatever belongs to the new creature may come forth.
Sheldon Van Auken
The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness.
Cornel West
There have always been Christians who are well-adjusted to greed, well-adjusted to fear, well-adjusted to bigotry. There have always ways been Christians who are maladjusted to greed, maladjusted to fear, and maladjusted to bigotry.
Mennonite Tradition
Q: “Are you a Christian?”
A: “Ask my neighbor.”
Randy Alcorn
People had only to look at Jesus to see what God is like. People today should only have to look at us to see what Jesus is like.
The Grace and Truth Paradox: Responding with Christlike Balance (Multnomah, 2003).
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