Sermon quotes on the future
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.
Corrie Ten Boom
Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.
Corrie Ten Boom
Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.
Catherine Booth
There is no improving the future without disturbing the present.
Phillips Brooks
The only way to get rid of your past is to make a future out of it. God will waste nothing.
William Carey
The future is as bright as the promises of God.
Oswald Chambers
Leave the broken, irreversible past in God’s hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.
Theodore Epp
As we trust God to give us wisdom for today’s decisions, He will lead us a step at a time into what He wants us to be doing in the future.
Daniel Fuller
The most vital concern for each of us is to have a joyful and fulfilled future… Whatever people hope for in the future, that is what they worship, and whatever people worship, that is what they inevitably serve.
John Green
“I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.”
Graham Greene
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
Billy Joel
“The good ol’ days weren’t always good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.”
Daniel Kahneman
We don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.
“The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory,” TED talk, February 2010.
Helen Keller
Discouraged not by difficulties without, or the anguish of ages within, the heart listens to a secret voice that whispers: “Be not dismayed; in the future lies the Promised Land.
Timothy Keller
How you experience your present is completely shaped by what you believe your ultimate future to be.
Søren Kierkegaard
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Woodrow Kroll
Live thoughtfully today and you won’t have to live regretfully tomorrow.
George Macdonald
The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, and the last duty done.
James Merritt
Long before we were born, God was overseeing our future as well. We didn’t choose our ancestors; God did. God designates our identity, as he did with Jesus, so that we might fit into his plan for the world. In other words, you can know just by your birth and unique identity that God has a special plan for your life.
George Orwell (For Contrast)
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
Blaise Pascal
In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
Blaise Pascal
If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.
R.C. Sproul
Christ told his disciples not to be anxious about tomorrow, but he never said not to consider tomorrow. Intelligent problem solving demands careful consideration of the future effects of present solutions.
A.W. Tozer
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us…. Where we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the questions… we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man.
Lisa Lieberman-Wang
It’s okay to look at the past and the future. Just don’t stare.
N.T. Wright
The solid facts about the future hope of Christians are a powerful motivation for constant faith and costly love in the present.
Yiddish Proverb
If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.
John D. Zizioulas
[The Christian Faith] has its roots in the future and its branches in the present.
Yogi Berra
If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.
Maria Rainer Rilke
Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.
Francois De Salignac De La Mothe Fénelon
The future is not yet ours; perhaps it never will be. If it comes, it may come wholly different from what we have foreseen. Let us shut our eyes, then, to that which God hides from us, and keeps in reserve in the treasures of His deep counsels. Let us worship without seeing; let us be silent; let us abide in peace.
John R.W. Stott
When we reflect on the life to come, the comparative is really inadequate and the superlative is appropriate. This is why, whenever we are reflecting on the future that awaits us, we can always say, “The best is yet to come.”
Taken from The Radical Disciple: Some Neglected Aspects of Our Calling by John R. W. Stott Copyright (c) 2010 by John R. W. Stott. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Richard Rohr
The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling or changing or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future.
Warren Buffet
Predicting rain doesn’t count; building arks does.
V. Raymond Edman
Never doubt in the dark what God showed you in the light
John R.W. Stott
When we reflect on the life to come, the comparative is really inadequate and the superlative is appropriate. This is why, whenever we are reflecting on the future that awaits us, we can always say, “The best is yet to come.”
Taken from The Radical Disciple: Some Neglected Aspects of Our Calling by John R. W. Stott Copyright (c) 2010 by John R. W. Stott. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Thomas Fuller
He that fears not the future may enjoy the present.
Matthew Henry
God has wisely kept us in the dark concerning future events and reserved for himself the knowledge of them, that he may train us up in a dependence upon himself and a continued readiness for every event.
C.S. Lewis
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
Shelly Miller
Uncertainty provides rescue from being stuck in the familiar ways of life that keep us from moving forward into the purposes of God. Wandering into the wilderness of the unknown is God’s divine reorientation, from what we know in the present to what God knows about the future.
Searching for Certainty: Finding God in the Disruptions of Life, Bethany House Publishers, 2020.
John Oswalt
Thus to wait for the Lord is to live the covenant life, to commit the future into God’s hands by means of living a daily life that shows that we know his ways of integrity, honesty, faithfulness, simplicity, mercy, generosity, and self denial. The person who does not wait for these things may be waiting for something, but he or she is not waiting for the Lord.
NIVAC Commentary: Isaiah, Zondervan
Dorothy L. Sayers
While time lasts there will always be a future, and that future will hold both good and evil, since the world is made to that mingled pattern.
Rainer Maria Rilke
“The Future”
The future: time’s excuse to frighten us; vast a project, too large a morsel for the heart’s mouth. Future, who won’t wait for you? Everyone is going there. It suffices you to deepen the absence that we are.
Taken from Rilke: Poems (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series) by Rainer Maria Rilke, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.
Jason Zweig
Forecasting: an attempt to predict the unknowable by measuring the irrelevant.
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