1. “Love is a commitment that will be tested in the most vulnerable areas of spirituality—a commitment that will force you to make some very difficult choices.”
2. “What I believe in my heart must make sense in my mind.”
3. “I think the reason we sometimes have the false sense that God is so far away is because that is where we have put him.”
4. “Yes, if truth is not undergirded by love, it makes the possessor of that truth obnoxious and the truth repulsive.”
5. “We have a right to believe whatever we want, but not everything we believe is right.”
6. “To sustain the belief that there is no God, atheism has to demonstrate infinite knowledge, which is tantamount to saying, ‘I have infinite knowledge that there is no being in existence with infinite knowledge.’”
7. “I am absolutely convinced that meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain; meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.”
8. “There is no greater discovery than seeing God as the author of your destiny.”
9. “Unless I understand the cross, I cannot understand why my commitment to what is right must take precedence over what I prefer.”
10. “There are some wonderful things from your painful past—things with a beauty you may not have realized at the time.”
11. “Time is the brush of God as he paints his masterpiece on the heart of humanity.”
12. “Truth by definition excludes.”
13. “You’ll never get to a person’s soul until you understand their hurts.”
14. “The four absolutes we all have in our minds—love, justice, evil, and forgiveness.”
15. “But life’s joys are only joys if they can be shared.”
16. “What you applaud, you encourage; but beware what you celebrate.”
17. “With no fact as a referent, what is normative is purely a matter of preference.”
18. “Teaching at best beckons us to morality, but it is not in itself efficacious. Teaching is like a mirror. It can show you if your face is dirty, but the mirror will not wash your face.”
19. “Faith is confidence in the person of Jesus Christ and in His power, so that even when His power does not serve my end, my confidence in Him remains because of who He is.”
Related:
20. “Worship is a posture of life that takes as its primary purpose the understanding of what it really means to love and revere God.”
21. “Every other person who is at the heart of any religion has had his or her beginning either in fancy or in fact. But nevertheless, there is a beginning.”
22. “We are his temple. We do not turn in a certain direction to pray. We are not bound by having to go into a building so that we can commune with God.”
23. “Jesus lifts us beyond the building and pays the human body the highest compliment by making it His dwelling place—the place where He meets with us.”
24. “If God is the author of life, there must be a script.”
25. “All religions are not the same. All religions do not point to God. All religions do not say that all religions are the same. At the heart of every religion is an uncompromising commitment to a particular way of defining who God is or is not, and accordingly, of defining life’s purpose.”
26. “Only if you are willing to pray sincerely for God’s will to be done and are willing to live the life apportioned to you will you see the breathtaking view of God that he wants you to have, through the windows he has placed in your life.”
27. “All religions, plainly and simply, cannot be true. Some beliefs are false, and we know them to be false. So it does no good to put a halo on the notion of tolerance as if everything could be equally true.”
28. “Worship very plainly opens up the healing of all of mankind. The struggle of gender, the struggle of race, the struggle of history, the struggle to find political liberation, the struggle of our own contradictions—nothing can be mended until we understand the symbol of Jesus’ breaking of the bread and pouring of the wine.”
29. “It is important to understand that it is a prayer life that builds character that honors God.”
30. “In persistent, fervent prayer, God prepares the soil of one’s heart to make room for the seed of His answer, from which will flower an alignment with His will.”
31. “So do not fear the struggle; rather, embrace it. Embrace it in the knowledge that the Grand Weaver will take all of your struggles, questions, disappointments, and fears and use them to build your faith and increasingly make you into a man or woman who looks like Jesus Christ.”
32. “Sacrilege is often defined as taking something that belongs to God and using it profanely, but there is a bigger sacrilege we commit all the time—that is to take something and give it to God when it means absolutely nothing to us.”
33. “Here is life’s essential purpose—to worship God in spirit and in truth. All other purposes are meant to be secondary. When they become primary, they destroy the individual.”
34. “Become a man or woman of . Let your heart and mind be kept close to the principal calling of your life, which is to hunger and thirst after God and His righteousness. Let the thoughts and intents of your heart be shaped and guided by time spent in His presence.”
35. “A calling is simply God’s shaping of your burden and beckoning you to your service to Him in the place and pursuit of his choosing.”
36. “More than anything else, prayer enables you to see your own heart and brings you into alignment with God’s heart.”
37. “Prayer is not a monologue in which we imagine ourselves to be communing with God. Rather, it is a dialogue through which God fashions your heart and makes his dream of you a reality.”
38. “The teaching of Jesus is clear. No one ought to be compelled to become a Christian.”
39. “The denial of Christ has less to do with facts and more to do with the bent of what a person is prejudiced to conclude.”
40. “Let your devotional life be the beacon that guides you through the tough terrain you will face.”
41. “In short, wonder is captured in one word—worship. When we have learned what worship is, we have experienced what wonder is.”
42. “Worship is a personal thing before it goes public. It is an individual thing before it is part of a community. It is a disciplined thing before it is natural.”
43. “The worldview of the Christian faith is simple enough. God has put enough into this world to make faith in him a most reasonable thing, but he has left enough out to make it impossible to live by sheer reason alone.”
44. “Faith for the Christian is the response of based on who Jesus Christ claimed to be, and it results in a life that brings both mind and heart in a commitment of love to Him.”
45. “Thankfully, our disappointments matter to God, and He has a way of taking even some of the bitterest moments we go through and making them into something of great significance in our life.”
46. “Faith is a thing of the mind. If you do not believe that God is in control and has formed you for a purpose, then you will flounder on the high seas of purposelessness, drowning in the currents and drifting further into nothingness.”
47. “That is what a well-guarded prayer life can reveal about us—that our trust is not in ourselves but in seeking God’s strength for what we do.”
48. “Prayer is not a substitute for action, but prayer undergirds action with the strength that makes the difference.”
49. “A worshiping community should be the fountain from which life flows and the ocean into which your efforts are merged.”
50. “Changes in language often reflect the changing values of a culture.”
51. “We are living in a time when sensitivities are at the surface, often vented with cutting words.”
52. “A mood can be a dangerous state of mind, because it can crush reason under the weight of feeling.”
53. “Sovereignty is only tyrannical if it is unbounded by goodness; holiness is only terrifying if it is untempered by grace; omniscience is only taunting if it is unaccompanied by mercy; and immutability is only torturous if there is no guarantee of goodwill.”
54. “Of all the religions in the world, there is none with the wealth of music that the Christian faith offers.”
55. “For many in our high-paced world, despair is not a moment; it is a way of life.”
56. “Truth is not only a matter of offense in that it makes certain assertions. It is also a matter of defense in that it must be able to make a cogent and sensible response to the counterpoints that are raised.”
57. “To deem all beliefs equally true is sheer nonsense for the simple reason that to deny that statement would also, then, be true. But if the denial of the statement is also true, then all religions are not true.”
58. “How much more grand is the work of our Heavenly Father as he pulls together all the varied strands of life to reveal his grand design?”
59. “The truth is that whenever a fence is removed, it’s wise to ask why it was put there in the first place.”
60. “Knowledge and education, in the hands of one who claims no higher or authority than one’s own individuality, is power in the hands of a fool.”
61. “Every religion at its core is exclusive.”
62. “God trained Moses in a palace to use him in a desert. He trained Joseph in a desert to use him in a palace.”
63. “The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life’s twin realities—love and hate.”
64. “By playing God and redefining good and evil according to our own discretion, we introduced into the human spirit disobedience, absence, severance, distrust, evil, and restlessness.”
65. “The DNA of generations past marks itself very deeply in us, and it takes a new birth for us to be able to see through new eyes.”
66. “And so the abnormal is now normal in entertainment, because the normal is treated as subnormal in the world of the media. That, I can assure you, is consciously done.”
67. “We are fashioned by God to be thinking and emotional creatures. The emotions should follow reason, and not the other way around.”
68. “It is only following redemption that we can truly understand the moral law for what it is—a mirror that indicates and calls the heart to seek God’s help. This makes moral reasoning the fruit of spiritual understanding and not the cause of it.”
69. “Legalism always breeds compliance over purpose.”
70. “Having lost this truth, what are we left with?”
71. “Starting at life’s cryptogram, we either see His name unmistakably resplendent or we see the confusion of religions with no single message, just garbled beliefs that plague our existence, each justified by the voice of culture.”
72. “Giving yourself the privilege of destroying other positions while parking your own position in an unidentifiable location is a form of linguistic terrorism.”
73. “We are all born into different beliefs, and therefore, we should leave it that way.”
74. “In some countries, you love your neighbors; and in others, you eat them.”
75. “There is no country in the world that I know of where the renunciation of one’s Christian faith puts one in danger of being hunted down by the powers of state.”
76. “One must respect the concern of a culture to protect what it deems sacred, but to compel a belief in Jesus Christ is foreign to the gospel, and that is a vital difference.”
77. “Any nation that neglects teaching the sacredness of life and the family does so at its own peril. Any nation that sanctions the removal of God’s boundaries will destroy its own.”
78. “Denying the existence of God leads us to preposterous conclusions so that, in the end, the amoral world of the skeptic who simply cannot explain good is worse than the world of the theist who has an explanation for evil.”
79. “The greater the involvement in another’s life, the greater is the demand for sacrifice.”
80. “The world is larger and more beautiful than my little struggle.”
81. “Life is worth living in and of itself.”
82. “My longings, my hopes, my dreams, and my every effort has been to live for Him who rescued me, to study for Him who gave me this mind, to serve Him who fashioned my will, and to speak for Him who gave me a voice.”
83. “We do not live so that we can eat, nor do we just eat so that we can live.”
84. “When God is our Holy Father, sovereignty, holiness, omniscience, and immutability do not terrify us; they leave us full of awe and gratitude.”
85. “Life cannot be satisfied when it is lived out as a consuming entity.”
86. “Our intellect is not intended to be an end in itself, but only a means to the very mind of God.”
87. “You cannot always live on the mountaintop, but when you walk through the valley, the memory of the view from the mountain will sustain you and give you the strength to carry you through.”
88. “His life spells living. Your life or my life, apart from Him, spells death.”
89. “But the greatest dream of all is to know God and to know what He has intended for your life.”
90. “The person who demands a sign and at the same time has already determined that anything that cannot be explained scientifically is meaningless, is not merely stacking the deck; he is losing at his own game.”
91. “Wonder is that possession of the mind that enchants the emotions, while never surrendering reason.”
92. “You must not act under the impetus of charm, but out of a commitment to make someone’s life the joy you want it to be.”
93. “Redemption precedes morality, and not the other way around.”
94. “Often, we are not aware of how close we are to that which we need but we think we do not have. In His grace, God has placed some hidden gold somewhere in all of us that meets our need at a desperate moment.”
95. “More and more, when something terrible happens, we declare, ‘That’s life!’—as though and heartache declare the sum total of this existence.”
96. “Sometimes, in the of one’s self lie the problems, and in the shadows of one’s shaping, lie the answers.”
97. “Beginning well is a momentary thing; finishing well is a lifelong thing.”
98. “Through the substance of human flesh flows life.”
99. “Life is more than matter.”
100. “In losing the high value that God has placed on the body, we are in free fall, at the , cruelty, and lust.”
101. “The disciplines of study, of reading and reflecting, of dialoguing in depth, and praying with belief sustain the wonder.”
102. “Fatalism is the creed of a will that is dying to its possibilities and seeks to drag the imagination with it.”
103. “His first step is to make temptation appear as a natural desire. It is something unequivocally physical and human.”
104. “The more you hold on to the true and the good, the more you are free to really live.”
105. “There is a difference between a belief and a conviction. A belief can become something you merely hold; a conviction is that which holds you.”
106. “Sexuality is sacred and using it for amusement brings diminishing returns.”
107. “Many pray for the right partner but cease to pray for the right union—that they be one as Jesus and the Father are one and so experience the full measure of His joy in the relationship.”
108. “Living under the tremendous illusion that personal freedoms and freedom of speech are devoid of moral assumptions and responsibilities, we have bankrupted ourselves, so that honor, truth, and morality have been sacrificed at the altar of autonomy and self-worship.”
109. “Time isn’t just a fleeting thing. It never moves forward without engraving its mark upon the heart.”
110. “My relationship with God is intimate and personal.”
111. “Goodness can endure a few moments; holiness is life-defining.”
112. “Every worldview has to bring together reason and faith.”
113. “Your and your disappointments are part of that design, to shape your heart and the way you feel about reality. The hurts you live through will always shape you. There is no other way.”
114. “Truth has been relegated to subjectivity; beauty has been subjugated to the beholder; and as millions are idiotized night after night, a global commune has been constructed with the arts enjoying a totalitarian rule.”
115. “God the Grand Weaver seeks those with tender hearts so that he can put his imprint on them.”
116. “The primary purpose of a home is to reflect and to distribute the love of Christ. Anything that usurps that is idolatrous.”
117. “The loss of something that is never thought of, felt, or sought for when lost, is not a loss at all.”
118. “Only when holiness and worship meet can evil be conquered. For that, only the Christian message has the answer.”
119. “Marriage brings together not just a man and his but their children and their struggles.”
120. “To suddenly drop the partner who has carried that load with you along life’s journey for all these years for someone with no strings or worries attached is cruel.”
121. “A heart that truly worships God gives generously to the causes of God—causes that God cares deeply about.”
122. “Marriage is not a commercial enterprise in which you replace a car you have tired of with another one.”
123. “The world was made for the body, the body was made for the soul, and the soul was made for God.”
124. “A heart that truly worships is a heart that gives its best to God in time and substance.”
125. “Chivalry in love has nothing to do with the sweetness of the appearance. It has everything to do with the tenderness of a heart determined to serve.”
126. “He asks to live in you, not to control your state.”
127. “That is the key to every believer’s life—full ownership by Christ.”
128. “Everything we are and want to be belongs to Him.”
129. “Presence, relationship, holiness, trust, beauty, goodness, peace—all were present in the relationship between God and humanity at creation.”
130. “Jesus came to save souls in His Father’s name with love and only love. That is why He turned up as a man. So why can’t we see His real message?”
131. “We forget the marvel of a marriage that has endured the test of time because we feel discouraged by the heartaches of loved ones whose marriages didn’t make it to the end.”
132. “It is truly the treasured gift of the Christian that through direct answers and not-so-direct answers, the follower of Jesus begins to love God for who he is, not for what he may get out of him.”
133. “The components of gratitude and truth, love and hope bring the realization of wonder.”
134. “Without the will, marriage is a mockery; without the emotion, it is a drudgery. You need both.”
135. “The love of God shows us that God alone bridges the distance between Him and us, enabling us to see this world through Calvary.”
136. “As you look at each other face to face and see the face of God, you move the home and history in the right direction. May that be our joy and hope.”
137. “Marriage brings face to face two people committed to God whose face is distinctively revealed in each as they see each other in the light of God, shining on each countenance. God brought them close to each other because each was the other’s answer from God, to rescue them from being alone.”
