Discipleship Quotes - Page 3

When I was 25, I believed I could change the world. At 41, I have come to the realization that I cannot change my wife, my church, or my kids, to say nothing of the world. Try as I might, I have not been able to manufacture outcomes the way I thought I could, either in my own life or other people’s.

Survivor" is not a label you choose for yourself.

It is hard to hear God, but it is even harder not to hear God. The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head on.

Discipling our children is not about teaching them to behave in a way that won’t embarrass us. We’re working toward something much more important than that. We’re actually raising our children with a view toward leading them to trust and to follow Christ.

Our task is to carry the Lord's peace into every situation, into every duty.

Make us, Lord, in Chesterton's distinction, travelers instead of tourists. Where the tourist defines his day by the expectation of seeing certain things, give us the traveler's openness to seeing what You will reveal.

Why do lazy, minimum effort employees always seem to find places where they feel "underappreciated"?

A book isn't worth reading if it's not worth discussing.

The president notices that when he takes off his coat to dig, people take more notice of the visual than they did his preceding remarks.

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

My job is not to get between YOU and God. My job is to put your hand IN God's hand.

the real tests of life can come a child’s way at any moment,

He was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil. He gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice.

When it comes to doing something about what is wrong in the world, Jesus is best known for his fondness for the minute, the invisible, the quiet, the slow – yeast, salt, seeds, light. And manure.

Young children especially need the visual reinforcement of seeing you turn to Scripture for wisdom.

Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. Leon Cass

They chose to regard it as a miraculous preservation.

I was determined to get them away from the idea that their education is a private experience.

Your current situation and workplace are your personal mission field. Why? Because you can reach people a church can't. You're on the front lines!

Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. It's as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you'll never know the meaning of your experiences until you've had enough of them to provide reference.

We have created youth ministry that confuses extroversion with faithfulness. We have effectively communicated to young people that sincerely following Jesus is synonymous with being 'fired up' for Jesus, with being excited for Jesus, as if discipleship were synonymous with fostering an exuberant, perky, cheerful, hurray-for-Jesus disposition like what we might find in the glee club or at a pep rally.

The purpose of prayer is not for the disciple to give information to God. The purpose of prayer is intimacy with God.

Challenge quandary thinking, either/or thinking come by moving from the abstract to the concrete. What can we do with the choice actually in front of us?

Alex had cooked, and coaxed, and helped Mark form borders around the shapeless days. Alex had given meaning to the word "servant".

Being self-owned is a state of mind.

Jesus calls us to his rest, and meekness is His method. The meek man cares not at all who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the world is not worth the effort.

The end is where we start from. T.S. Eliot

God's way leads always into trial, so far as sight and sense are concerned. Nature always will be tried in God's ways.

As soon as (Teddy Roosevelt) received an assignment for a paper or project, he would set to work, never leaving anything to the last minute. Prepared so far ahead "freed his mind" from worry and facilitated fresh, lucid thought.

It's exciting to work with the kids so devoid of irony, so unguarded. And also terrifying.

The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.

Action without prayer thins out into something very exterior. A prayerless life can result in effective action and accomplish magnificent things, but if there is no developed interiority, the action never enters into the depth and intimacy of relationships.

Jesus' simple poetic words are delivered casually and gently. Jesus prefers to explain a difficult concept over time, never talking down to His followers, patiently letting the words soak in until they understand them fully.

The author, at the time a Carter speechwriter in the 1980 campaign, showed visible distress at his boss's performance and was warned by a friend in the traveling press, lest he become the story.

How vigilant we must be to ensure that we don’t allow our impression of Jesus to be held captive by the prevailing mores of our secular culture! Rather, it is essential that we continue to return to the Gospels to ensure that the reverse occurs: to allow Jesus to hold our hearts and imaginations captive in response to the dominant thinking of our time. For exiles trying to live faithfully within the host empire of post-Christendom, the Gospel stories are our most dangerous memories. They continue to fire our imaginations and remind us that it’s possible to thrive on foreign soil while serving Yahweh, but it’s the kind of thriving that often rejects popular wisdom. These stories are the standard by which we judge all other stories, all other descriptors of life today. If, after reading these dangerous biblical stories, you can’t imagine Jesus the Messiah as a televangelist, strutting around on stage in a flashy suit, playing it up for the cameras, then you are forced to reject this image and seek another mode of being Christ today.

We would do our theology better if more was at stake in what we said.

The obedience which God's children yield to Him must be loving obedience. Do not go about the service of God as slaves to their taskmaster's toil, but run in the way of His commands because it is your Father's way.

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is the great venture. It can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to mistrust, and this mistrusts in turn brings forth war.

Shanahan (the head coach) doesn't allow failure to take root.

Sometimes a citizenry should not simply "be good". You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent.

You can't teach a person to love something. But you can get him to feel the heat of your love for something.

The generation of American men who fought the Second World War were too struck by the scale of the effort – and the stakes of the effort – to see the war as a stage for their own personal heroism. Most men seem to have taken the lesson that there's enough honor in doing a hard job when you have to.

An animal will conquer others. A Spirit-filled man conquers himself – self-discipline, self-control.

Show me a person in my shoes who is looking for a robot, and I'll show you someone who is looking for a person and can't find one.

At the end of life, each of us must answer the question, Whose story captured my soul?

My cell phone is my only individual zone, just for me.

Fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child or an adult in any consistent way, but if you can surround a person with a new culture, and different web of relationships, then they will absorb new habits of thought and behavior in ways you will never be able to measure or understand. And if you do surround that person with a new, enriching culture, then you had better keep surrounding them with it, because if they slip back into a different culture, and most of the gains will fade away.

God is the I AM that I AM not the I AM that we wish.

It is not great counts God blesses so much as likeness to Jesus.

There are only three ways to teach a child. The first is by example, the second is by example, the third is by example.

Any counseling that does not pursue spiritual formation through an intimate relationship with Jesus by faith as one of its chief goals is not worthy to be called BIBLICAL counseling.

You can unlock spiritual things only from within.

Many Christians want the benefits of their belief, but they hesitate at the cost of discipleship.

I found myself speaking more slowly (in an attempt to obey the Bible in speech), as if I was speaking French instead of English.

let anyone using those weasel words “freedom of worship” know, they have “freedom of worship” in China and it is meaningless and it is vile. “Freedom of worship” says you may do what you like in that building on Sunday mornings or whenever you like, but when you come out you will bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state. That is the antithesis of what the Founders meant in guaranteeing “freedom of religion.

Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel.

Christian spirituality combines a sense of the awe and majesty of God with a sense of His intimate presence.

He (Peter) doesn't know if he's looking into the eyes of a madman, or the eyes of a King.

Shame and suffering, as St. Bernard says, are the two ladder-uprights which are set up to heaven, and between those two uprights are the rungs of all virtues fixed, by which one climbs to the joy of heaven… In these two things, in which is all penance, rejoice and be glad, for in return for these, twofold blisses are prepared: in return for shame honour; in return for suffering, delight and rest without end.