Sermon Quotes
The World
Augustine of Hippo
I sighed and you heard me. I wavered and you steadied me. I travelled along the broad way of the world, but you did not desert me.
Frederick Buechner
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.
Jacques Ellul
Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we’ve always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.
Albert Einstein
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
John Greenleaf Whittier
We search the world for truth; we cull The good, the pure, the beautiful, From all old flower fields of the soul; And, weary seekers of the best, We come back laden from our quest, To find that all the sages said Is in the Book our mothers read.
Helen Keller
All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.
John Knox
As the world is weary of me so am I of it.
C.S. Lewis
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.
C.S. Lewis
A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-and might be even more difficult to save.
Martin Luther
Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.
Alexander MacLaren
The mystery of the universe, and the meaning of God’s world, are shrouded in hopeless obscurity, until we learn to feel that all laws suppose a lawgiver, and that all working involves a Divine energy.
Margaret Mead
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Nancy Pearcey
Having a Christian worldview means being utterly convinced that biblical principles are not only true but also work better in the grit and grime of the real world.
Richard Rohr
Maturity is the ability to joyfully live in an imperfect world.
Job and the Mystery of Suffering: Spiritual Reflections”, Gracewing Publishing
Charles Schulz
Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.
J.R.R. Tolkien
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J.R.R. Tolkien
“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
Leo Tolstoy
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Mark Twain
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
Elwyn Brooks White
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
Stephen Crane
“A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!
“However” replied the universe
‘The fact has not created in me
a sense of obligation.”
War Is Kind, Stokes Publishing
Eugene Peterson
A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appetite for the world of grace.
Taken from Run with the Horses by Eugene H. Peterson. ©2009, 2019 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove IL 60515-1426. www.ivpress.com
Søren Kierkegaard
Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this.
Basil of Caesarea
The world is a work of art, set before all for contemplation, so that through it the wisdom of Him who created it should be known …”
Exegetical Works, On the Hexameron
C. Gene Wilkes
Jesus came to show us what life in the kingdom looked like, not how to modify how the world did things.
Mike Cosper
I am programmed to expect that the world is what I can see, touch, and measure.
Taken from Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World by Mike Cosper. Copyright (c) 2017, p.9. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Dennis Wholey
Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.
Jean Sulivan
The Gospel is not made to dominate the world. It’s the grain of sand that upsets the world’s machinery. One can’t inhale its fragrance and be content to leave everything the way it is.
“Morning Light” Christianity Today, Vol. 33, no. 16
Harold Thurman
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Leslie Bricusse
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.
Title of musical comedy (1961). Current as graffiti before 1961.
Robert Jones Burdette
Don’t believe the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing—it was here first.
Quoted in Evan Esar, The Dictionary of Humorous Quotations,1949.
Tony Reinke
The World watches the slandered church as something of a vain curiosity, but in reality, the church is a spectacle of her own—a large cast collectively playing the starring role as bride of in the human drama for which all of creation was made as a theater to display.
Taken from Competing Spectacles by Tony Reinke, © 2019, p,102. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.
Søren Kierkegaard
When one has once fully entered the realm of Love, the world—no matter how imperfect—becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for Love.
Walter Brueggemann
The world is God’s way of bestowing blessings upon us.
Our times are ordered by God according to the seasons of the year, according to
the seasons of life, according to the needs of the day.
David Kinnaman
Being salt and light demands two things: we practice purity in the midst of a fallen world and yet we live in proximity to this fallen world. If you don’t hold up both truth in tension, you invariably becomes useless and separated from the world God loves.
Ernest Hemingway
The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
Meister Eckhart
As thou art in church or cell, that same frame of mind carry out into the world, into its turmoil and its fitfulness.
Richard Mather
Experience shows that it is an easy thing in the midst of worldly business to lose the life and power of religion, that nothing thereof should be left but only the external form, as it were the carcass or shell, worldliness having eaten out the kernel, and having consumed the very soul of life and godliness.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
With every beatitude, the gulf is widened between the disciples and the people, and their call to come forth from the people becomes increasingly manifest.
The Cost of Discipleship, 6th and complete English edition, SCM, 1959.
Ed Stetzer and Mike Dodson
It’s ironic that most evangelical churches are filled with people who live very much like the world but look different from it. It should be exactly the opposite. We should look similar to those in our community but act differently.
Comeback Churches: How 300 Churches Turned Around and Yours Can, Too, B&H Books, 2007.
Corrie ten Boom
If you look at the world, you’ll be distressed. If you look within, you’ll be depressed. If you look at God, you’ll be at rest.
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