“Better to love God and die unknown than to love the world and be a hero; better to be content with poverty than to die a slave to wealth; better to have taken some risks and lost than to have done nothing and succeeded at it.”1
“Thanksgiving for God’s faithfulness in our pain is the indisputable proof that we believe God is a part of our pain.”
“Every time we love, we increase our capacity to be hurt.”
“As children bring their broken toys, With tears for us to mend, I brought my broken dreams to God Because He was my friend. But then instead of leaving Him In peace to work alone, I hung around and tried to help With ways that were my own. At last I snatched them back and cried, ‘How can you be so slow?’ ‘My child,’ He said, ‘What could I do? You never did let go.’”
“Salvation is free, but as the seven churches in Revelation discovered, there is a cost to living authentic lives of holiness in a godless culture.”
“Most of us find comfort in being told that we are going to go on living; [the apostle] Paul was comforted when he was told that he would soon be dying [see Philippians 1:21]! He kept referring to death as that which was ‘far better.’ The fact that we don’t view death with optimism just might be because we think of death as taking us from our home rather than bringing us to our home! Unlike Paul, we have become so attached to our tent that we just don’t want to move.
“Our sin is never a private matter. We cannot say, ‘It only hurts me.’”
“In a sense, to speak of heaven as our home is not a figure of speech; heaven is our home.”
“Church growth experts tell us that most people seeking a new church care little about its doctrines. They’re mostly interested in the facilities of the church, its nursery, and opportunities for friendship. . . .The experts tell us that today’s church members will switch churches at a moment’s notice if they think that their personal and relational needs will be better met elsewhere–even if the doctrine taught is at best, suspect. Thus some will opt for better facilities and architecture even at the expense of jeopardizing their own soul.”
“We should never interpret the silence of God as the indifference of God.”
“Despite its foundational Christian heritage, America is rapidly degenerating into a godless society. The church in America, although highly visible and active, appears powerless to redirect the rushing secular currents. Mired in a moral and spiritual crisis, America’s only hope is a national revival, like God has graciously bestowed in the past.”
“Annihilationism simply will not wash. Christ says that the lost will go into ‘eternal fire,’ which has been prepared for the devil and his angels. And then He adds, ‘And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life’ (Matthew 25:46). Since the same word eternal describes both the destiny of the righteous and the wicked, it seems clear that Christ taught that both groups will exist forever, albeit in different places. The same eternal fire that Satan and his hosts experience will be the lot of unbelievers… The wicked will experience shame and contempt for as long as the righteous experience bliss.”
“If we haven’t learned to be worshippers it doesn’t really matter how well we do anything else. Worship changes us or it has not been worship. To stand before the Holy One of eternity is to change. Worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience.”
“Those who give much without sacrifice are reckoned as having given little.”
“Think of how powerless death actually is! Rather than rid us of our health, it introduces us to ‘riches eternal.’ In exchange for poor health, death gives us a right to the Tree of Life that is for ‘the healing of the nations’ (Revelation 22:2). Death might temporarily take our friends from us, but only to introduce us to that land in which there are no good-byes.”
“We must worship in truth. Worship is not just an emotional exercise but a response of the heart built on truth about God. ‘The Lord is near to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth’ (Psm. 145:18). Worship that is not based on God’s Word is but an emotional encounter with oneself.”
“Universalism has never been widely accepted by those who take the Scriptures seriously. Obviously if this teaching were true, there would be no pressing reason to fulfill the Great Commission or to urge unbelievers to accept Christ in this life.”
“Temptation is not a sin; it is a call to battle.”
“Faith is only as good as the object in which it is placed.”
1 All of the following quotes are from the websites below: