Sermon quotes on purpose
William Barclay
There are two great days in a person’s life … the day we are born and the day we discover why.
Oswald Chambers
Jesus Christ became Incarnate for one purpose, to make a way back to God that man might stand before Him as He was created to do, the friend and lover of God Himself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.
The Brothers Karamazov
Henry Drummond
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.
Albert Einstein
We are here for the sake of others.
Helen Keller
Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
Friedrich Nietzsche
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
Sam Storms
Creation in its totality exists as a means to the fulfillment of some specific purpose that terminates on and for the sake of Jesus Christ.
Rick Warren
Time is your most precious gift because you only have a set amount of it. You can make more money, but you can’t make more time. When you give someone your time, you are giving them a portion of your life that you’ll never get back. Your time is your life. That is why the greatest gift you can give someone is your time.
It is not enough to just say relationships are important; we must prove it by investing time in them. Words alone are worthless. “My children, our love should not be just words and talk; it must be true love, which shows itself in action.” Relationships take time and effort, and the best way to spell love is “T-I-M-E.”
The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?
Rick Warren
Without a purpose, life is motion without meaning, activity without direction, and events without reason.
St. Catherine of Siena
If you are what you should be, then you will set the world on fire.
Whit Hobbs
Success is waking up in the morning, whoever you are, wherever you are, however old or young, and bounding out of bed because there’s something out there that you love to do, that you believe in, that you’re good at—something that’s bigger than you are, and you can hardly wait to get at it again today.
Steven Garber
Our propensity to deceive ourselves about our place and purpose makes it so very difficult to see the truth of our lives, to understand the meaning of our moment in history and our responsibility to it.
Taken from Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good by Steven Garber, Copyright (c) 2014, pp.15-16. Steven Garber. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
N.T. Wright
Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.
Surprised by Hope
Bruce Waltke
God created [mankind] and therefore only God can reveal to us our identity and function. Without this biblical revelation, we are lost in a maze of confusion.
An Old Testament Theology: An Exegetical, Canonical, and Thematic Approach (Zondervan Academic, 2011)
Simon Sinek, David Mead, and Peter Docker
Fulfillment is a right and not a privilege. Every single one of us is entitled to feel fulfilled by the work we do, to wake up feeling inspired to go to work, to feel safe when we’re there and to return home with a sense that we contributed to something larger than ourselves. Fulfillment is not a lottery. It is not a feeling reserved for a lucky few who get to say, “I love what I do.”
Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team (Portfolio, 2017).
Edmund J. Bourne
For some people, a lack of purpose and meaning in life can provide fertile ground for the development of panic attacks and phobias.
The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook, 5th ed., New Harbinger, 2010, 448.
John Mason Brown
Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
Craig Dykstra And Dorothy Bass
We long to see our lives whole and to know that they matter. We wonder whether our many activities might ever come together in a way of life that is good for ourselves and others. Are we really living in right relation to other people, to the created world, and to God?
Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, Ed. Dorothy Bass, 1997.
Jeanne d’Arc
Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing, and so they give their lives to little or nothing. One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it…and then it’s gone.
But to surrender who you are and to live without belief is more terrible than dying – even more terrible than dying young.
Dick Ryan
Bit by intelligible bit, a vocation lets us express
our healthiest instincts, our noblest desires…
In small things and in large, we can attend to
the haunting inner summons of our soul.
Straight from the Heart: Reflections from Twentieth-Century Mystics ed. Crossroad Publishing Company, 2001, p.85.
Daniel Taylor
One of the dearest indications of a flawed life story is its failure to give one the sense of purpose and conviction necessary to live life with an acceptable degree of optimism and resolve. A failed story no longer encourages the kind of life you feel it is important to live.
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