Sermon quotes on problems

Henry Cloud

All of our problems stem from our failure to reflect the image of God.

Changes That Heal: The Four Shifts That Make Everything Better…And That Everyone Can Do, Zondervan.

Charles De Montesquieu

Happiness is not the absence of problems, but the ability to deal with them.

Philip K. Dick

Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

Albert Einstein

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Frederick Buechner

It is not the objective proof of God’s existence that we want but the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.

Thomas Carlyle

We are the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God.

Robert Frost

The best way out is always through.

Poem: A Servant to Servants

Lori Gottlieb

Often, though, people carry around the belief that the majority of their problems are circumstantial or situational—which is to say, external. And if the problems are caused by everyone and everything else, by stuff out there, why should they bother to change themselves? Even if they decide to do things differently, won’t the rest of the world still be the same?

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed, HMH Books, 2019, p.9.

Thomas a Kempis

A wise and good man will turn examples of all sorts to his own advantage. The good he will make his patterns, and strive to equal or excel them. The bad he will by all means avoid.

Martin Luther King Jr.

We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.

Martin Luther King Jr.

[I] know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems….

John of Kronstadt

Do not fear the conflict, and do not flee from it; where there is no struggle, there is no virtue.

Paul Lockhart

A good problem is something you don’t know how to solve. That’s what makes it a good puzzle and a good opportunity.”

A Mathematician’s Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form

Max Lucado

God never promises to remove us from our struggles. He does promise, however, to change the way we look at them.

Max Lucado

The key is this: Meet today’s problems with today’s strength. Don’t start tackling tomorrow’s problems until tomorrow. You do not have tomorrow’s strength yet. You simply have enough for today.”

Traveling Light: Releasing the Burdens You Were Never Intended to Bear

Max Lucado

The next time you find yourself alone in a dark alley facing the undeniables of life, don’t cover them with a blanket, or ignore them with a nervous grin. Don’t turn up the TV and pretend they aren’t there. Instead, stand still, whisper his name, and listen. He is nearer than you think.

John C. Maxwell

Decisions should always be made as close to the problem as possible.

Good Leaders Ask Great Questions, Center Street.

Cormac McCarthy

“you fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain’t nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It’s just a aggravation.”

No Country for Old Men

Mother Teresa

The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small.

John Ortberg

We tend to be preoccupied by our problems when we have a heightened sense of vulnerability and a diminished sense of power. Today, see each problem as an invitation to prayer.”

The Me I Want to Be: Becoming God’s Best Version of You

J.I. Packer

Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life’s problems fall into place of their own accord.

Knowing God

Neil Postman

Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales.

Robert Schuller

Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.

Wayne Stiles

We think our problem is with God, but remember, God is perfect. Our problem is really with ourselves.

Waiting on God, Baker Publishing Group, 2015, p.53

Harriet Beecher Stowe

I long to put the experience of fifty years at once into your young lives, to give you at once the key to that treasure chamber every gem of which has cost me tears and struggles and prayers, but you must work for these inward treasures yourselves.

Source Unknown

Running away from any problem only increases the distance from the solution.

Surgeon (Graham Chapman)

“There’s nothing wrong with you that an expensive operation can’t prolong.”

Monty Python’s Flying Circus

A.W. Tozer

What then are we to do about our problems? We must learn to live with them until such time as God delivers us from them. We must pray for grace to endure them without murmuring. Problems patiently endured will work for our spiritual perfecting. They harm us only when we resist them or endure them unwillingly.

Paul David Tripp

In times of struggle and failure, we need to do more than pronounce judgment on what’s wrong and enforce punishment. We need to talk, discuss, question, evaluate, engage, and interact with our teenagers, hoping that God will use these moments of opportunity to open their eyes a little more to who they really are and to their constant need for Christ.

Harry S. Truman

Selfishness and greed, individual or national, cause most of our troubles.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.

Philosophical Investigations

Ed Stetzer and Mike Dodson

Leaders help churches see that their real problems are spiritual.

Comeback Churches: How 300 Churches Turned Around and Yours Can, Too, B&H Books, 2007.

Homer Simpson (Matt Groening)

Here’s to alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.

Pope Pius XI 

Let us thank God that he makes us live among the present problems…It is no longer permitted to present problems…. It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre.

Brady Boyd 

Ultimately, every problem I see in every person I know is a problem of moving too fast for too long in too many aspects of life.

Addicted to Busy: Recovery for the Rushed Soul (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2014), 44.

Albert Einstein

Problems cannot be solved with the same consciousness that created them.

Matt Haig

In order to get over a problem it helps to look at it. You can’t climb a mountain that you pretend isn’t there.

The Comfort Book, Penguin Life, 2021

Charles Spurgeon

Our worst things are often our best things. . . . There is blessing concealed in the righteous man’s crosses, losses, and sorrows. The trials of the saint are a divine husbandry, by which he grows and brings forth abundant fruit.”

The Treasury of David: Psalm 1, Blue Letter Bible, accessed April 12, 2019.

Brady Boyd 

Ultimately, every problem I see in every person I know is a problem of moving too fast for too long in too many aspects of life.

Addicted to Busy: Recovery for the Rushed Soul (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2014), 44.

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