Sermon quotes on training
Muhammad Ali
I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’
Aristotle
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.
Tod Bolsinger
Christian Leaders: You were trained for a world that is disappearing.
Epictetus
Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.
The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness
Antony Jay
The only real training for leadership is leadership.
John C. Maxwell
A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.
Thomas S. Monson
Learn from the past, prepare for the future, live in the present.
Jesse Owens
A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.
Plato
Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
James Bryan Smith
The passion of my life has been to find the answer to this question: How do we become like Christ? I have come to believe that the problem is not that we do not want to change, nor is the problem that we are not trying to change. The problem is that we are not training.
The Good and Beautiful God: Falling in Love with the God Jesus Knows
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
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
John Ortberg
There is an immense difference between training to do something and trying to do something.
The Life You’ve Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People, expanded edition (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2002, p.43.
Max Lucado
Don’t see your struggle as an interruption to life but as preparation for life. No one said the road would be easy or painless. But God will use your mess for something good. “This trouble you’re in isn’t punishment; it’s training, the normal experience of children. . . . God is doing what is best for us, training us to live God’s holy best” (Hebrews 12:8, 10 MSG).
God Will Carry You Through, Thomas Nelson, 2013, p.61.
James Bryan Smith
I have come to believe that the problem is not that we do not want to change, nor is the problem that we are not trying to change. The problem is that we are not training. We have never been taught a reliable pattern of transformation.
St. John Chrysostom
The disciples are tossed on the waves again. They are in a storm, fully as bad as the previous one. Gently and by degrees he excites and urges the disciples on toward greater responsiveness, even to the point of bearing all things nobly. Whereas in the previous storm they had him with them in the ship, now they were alone by themselves…Now he is leading them into a greater degree of challenge…This was all for their training, that they might not look for some easy hope of preservation from any earthly source…He cast them directly into a situation in which they would have a greater longing for him and a continual remembrance of him.
The Gospel of Matthew Homily 50.1, from The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture
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