Sermon quotes on practices
Dave Barry
As sensitive and broad-minded humans, we must never allow ourselves to be in any way judgmental of the religious practices of other people, even when these people clearly are raving space loons.
Henry Ward Beecher
The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.
Malcolm Gladwell
Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.
Outliers: The Story of Success
Anne Lamott
You can either practice being right or practice being kind.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.
Henri Nouwen, with Michael J. Christensen and Rebecca J. Laird
A spiritual discipline or practice is a way of creating some open and free space in which God can move an speak. For example, the discipline of solitude helps us spend time with God alone and so become aware of the divine silence. The discipline of community helps to let God speak to us through others…All the disciplines of the spiritual life are intended to help us to move from an absurd (deaf) life to an obedient (listening) life of freedom, joy, and peace.
J.I. Packer
“The modern way with God is to set him at a distance, if not to deny him altogether; and the irony is that modern Christians, preoccupied with maintaining religious practices in an irreligous world, have themselves allowed God to become remote…for churchmen who look at God through the wrong end of the telescope, so reducing him to pigmy proportions, cannot hope to end up as more than pigmy Christians.
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
Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
Matthew Boulton
For Calvin, the church is a gymnasium, a training ground, a school, and community of preparation and practice enrolled (we hope and pray) in God’s sanctifying, transformative paideia.
Life in God: John Calvin, Practical Formation, and the Future of Protestant Theology
Craig Dykstra
The life of Christian faith is the practice of many practices
Thomas Merton
Souls are like athletes that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers.
The Seven Storey Mountain
Lauren F. Winner
Spiritual practices don’t justify us. They don’t save us. Rather, they refine our Christianity; they make the inheritance Christ gives us on the Cross more fully our own.
Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Disciplines, Paraclete Press.
Bill Holm
Keep practicing until it lives inside you; then it will seem foolishly easy to the unpracticed.
Fried Chicken In Iceland
Dallas Willard
Our mistake is to think that following Jesus consists in loving our enemies, going the ‘second mile,’ turning the other cheek, suffering patiently and hopefully—while living the rest of our lives just as everyone else around us does.
The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives. Reprint edition. San Francisco: HarperOne, p.5 1999.
Kent Annan
The defining ingredient of real human life is fidelity. It’s not wealth, power, control, or knowledge. It’s fidelity, the question of practice—how do we maintain fidelity [with God]?
Taken from Slow Kingdom Coming: Practices for Doing Justice, Loving Mercy and Walking Humbly in the World by Kent Annan Copyright (c) 2016 by Kent Annan. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Anthony Robbins
It’s what you practice in private that you will be rewarded for in public.