Sermon quotes on relationships
Augustine of Hippo
Nothing so clearly discovers a spiritual man as his treatment of an erring brother.
Randy Alcorn
Countless mistakes in marriage, parenting, ministry, and other relationships are failures to balance grace and truth. Sometimes we neglect both. Often we choose one over the other.
Henry Blackaby
To be loved by God is the highest relationship, the highest achievement, and the highest position in life.
John C. Broger
Learning how to love your neighbor requires a willingness to draw on the strength of Jesus Christ as you die to self and live for Him. Living in this manner allows you to practice biblical love for others in spite of adverse circumstances or your feelings to the contrary.
Henry Drummond
There are some men and some women in whose company we are always at our best. While with them we cannot think mean thoughts or speak ungenerous words. Their mere presence is elevation, purification, sanctity. All the best stops in our nature are drawn out by their intercourse, and we find a music in our souls that was never there before.
Wayne Dyer
Problems in relationship occur because each person is concentrating on what is missing in the other person.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Treat a man as he appears to be, and you make him worse. But treat a man as if he were what he potentially could be, and you make him what he should be.
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: A Novel
Billy Graham
God is more interested in your future and your relationships than you are.
R. Kent Hughes
On the most elementary level, you do not have to go to church to be a Christian. You do not have to go home to be married either. But in both cases if you do not, you will have a very poor relationship.
Eugen Rostenstock-Huessy
The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profound relationships.
The Christian Future
Timothy Keller
Falling in love in a Christian way is to say, ‘I am excited about your future and I want to be part of getting you there. I’m signing up for the journey with you. Would you sign up for the journey to my true self with me? It’s going to be hard but I want to get there.
Timothy Keller
The early church was strikingly different from the culture around it in this way – the pagan society was stingy with its money and promiscuous with its body. A pagan gave nobody their money and practically gave everybody their body. And the Christians came along and gave practically nobody their body and they gave practically everybody their money.
Tony Robbins
Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they’re trying to find someone who’s going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.
Francis Schaeffer
Doctrinal rightness and rightness of ecclesiastical position are important, but only as a starting point to go on into a living relationship – and not as ends in themselves.
Henry Winkler
Assumptions are the termites of relationships.
Jason Jordan
True love does not come by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.
Richard Plass and James Cofield
We are relational beings because we are created in the image of a relational God.
Taken from The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection by Richard Plass and James Cofield, Copyright (c) 2014, p.15 by Richard Plass and James Cofield. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Richard Plass and James Cofield
We were created with this relational likeness and we long for relational connection because God exists in a relationship of love.
Taken from The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection by Richard Plass and James Cofield, Copyright (c) 2014, p.13 by Richard Plass and James Cofield. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Richard Plass and James Cofield
Why do we feel so much energy in our sexuality? Because we are created by and for intimacy. Our sexual energy is proof of our relational essence. We can hardly stand a “divided” condition because we are relational at our core.
Taken from The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection by Richard Plass and James Cofield, Copyright (c) 2014, p.41 by Richard Plass and James Cofield. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Honoré de Balzac
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
Julie Canlis
[Koinōnia] is at the heart of the Christian understanding of the triune God as a rich relationship not between individuals but between persons who indwell one another in a loving harmony of friendship and communion. As such, koinōnia is at the center of Christian theology (the study of God), anthropology (the study of ourselves), and spirituality (the Christian pattern of experience: being led by the Spirit into God’s own triune communion).
Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), p. 8.
Sherwood G. Lingenfelter and Marvin K. Mayers
The key for successful personal relationships and ministry is to understand and accept others as having a viewpoint as worthy of consideration as our own.
Ravi Zacharias
Enchantment in life can never be realized in some thing; it must ultimately culminate in a person.
John Ortberg
Ever console or scold people hurt in human relationships that satisfaction comes from God alone? Stop. Adam’s fellowship with God was perfect, and God Himself declared Adam needed other humans.
Jerry Seinfeld
“Breaking up is like knocking over a Coke machine. You can’t do it in one push; you got to rock it back and forth a few times, and then it goes over.”
Seinfeld
Ronald Rolheiser
No relationship, however deep and intimate, can ever fully take our loneliness from us.
Howard Thurman
I have always wanted to be me without making it difficult for you to be you.
John Ortberg
For me, a table is a reminder that what really matters in life is relationships. We are hardwired for emotional connection to other people. We want to be known. We crave being loved. We want to be accepted by someone who is completely aware of our gifts and our flaws and yet wants to be with us anyway. In short, we crave intimacy.
John Ortberg
God uses our relationships with other people to teach us how to love him. The more we pursue intimacy in our other relationships, the more we see and understand God’s incredible, audacious love for us.
Paul David Tripp
Through difficult relationships and circumstances, God works to expose your heart so you will seek the grace that can be found only in him.
Taken from New Morning Mercies by Paul David Tripp, © 2014. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.
A.T. Pierson
To a true child of God, the invisible bond that unites all believers to Christ is far more tender, and lasting, and precious; and, as we come to recognize and realize that we are all dwelling in one sphere of life in Him, we learn to look on every believer as our brother, in a sense that is infinitely higher than all human relationships. This is the one and only way to bring disciples permanently together. All other plans for promoting the unity of the Church have failed.
Dallas Willard
Wrong ideas about God make it impossible for us to function in relationship with one another.
Paul Jensen
It takes time to build and sustain healthy relationships. Time pressures can erode the quality of relationships and create fragmentation and isolation.
Subversive Spirituality (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2009), p. 63.
Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker
Relationships are a large playing field upon which other life contests and struggles get worked out.
Chuck DeGroat
The relational posture of a Christian is anchored in our union with Christ. God dwells in us, by the Spirit, nearer to us than our very breath-Anyone who lives from this depth of intimate relationship will long to be like-minded, unified, unselfish, humble, deferential, and self-sacrificial—anything but narcissistic.
Taken from When Narcissism Comes to Church by Chuck DeGroat Copyright (c) 2020 by Chuck DeGroat. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Ashley Hales
We value people for what they do for us rather than as fellow human beings created to enjoy God and made in his image.
Taken from Finding Holy in the Suburbs: Living Faithfully in the Land of Too Much
by Ashley Hales Copyright (c) 2009 by Ashley Hales. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
George Burns
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring close-knit family in another city.
John D. Zizioulas
The human being is defined through otherness. It is a being whose identity emerges only in relation to other beings, God, the animals and the rest of creation.
Knox McCoy
In Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum taught us that life finds a way, but for me, so does awkwardness.
Dharius Daniels
Jim Collins writes in his book Good to Great, we need the right people on our bus and we also need them in the right seats.
Dharius Daniels
Yes, we should treat everyone right, but treating everyone right doesn’t mean we treat everyone the same. Jesus didn’t. Relating to people properly should not be confused with treating them equally.
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