ACTION

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Edmund Burke

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions; … who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Teddy Roosevelt

Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now. Goethe

In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing. Theodore Roosevelt

It is time for all of us to cheer for the doer, the achiever- the one who recognizes the challenge and does something about it. Vince Lombardi

Above all, try something.  Franklin Roosevetl

It is a given-for most people an accepted fact-that being uncomfortable is sufficient reason for not doing.

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action. Benjamin Disraeli

Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even profit by it, but to cause it. Harry Fosdick

Do or do not.  There is no try. Yoda

It all comes down to do.

Principles without programs are platitudes. Bernard Shaw

ADVERSITY

If indeed there had been anything better and more profitable to the health of men than to suffer, Christ would surely have shown it by word and example.  Thomas a Kempis

God saves his deepest silence for his saints.   John Updike

Only the one who has been hurt can bring healing. The other person cannot. It is the one who has been hurt who has to be willing to be hurt again to show love, if there is to be hope that healing will come. Francis Schaeffer

Pain is a kindly, hopeful thing, a certain proof of life, a clear assurance that all is not yet over, that there is still a chance. But if your heart has no pain -- well, that may betoken health, as you suppose: but are you certain that it does not mean that your soul is dead?  A. J. Gossip

Affliction is both a medicine if we sin, and a preservative that we sin not. Richard Hooker

The quickest way to the heart is through a wound.  John Piper

For God to do an impossible work he must take an impossible man and crush him.  Chuck Swindoll

God always preserves something out of catastrophe on which to build.

It is doubtful whether God can use a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply, and the degree that God uses him is directly proportionate to the depth of his hurt.  A. W. Tozer

The great blows of God are designed to stand a man up, to awaken him from the dream world of his tiny humanity and make him take his place as an image of God, as a creature made in the likeness of God.  John Hercus

Former Justice Brandeis, to his frustrated impatient daughter, "My dear, if you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you.  Justice Brandeis

What we do in a crisis always depends on whether we see the difficulties in the light of God, or God in the shadow of the difficulties.  G. Campbell Morgan

Adversity causes some men to break, others to break records. William Ward

All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming it. Helen Keller

A difficult crisis can be more readily endured if we retain the conviction that our existence holds a purpose-a cause to pursue, a person to love, a goal to achieve.

You do not get to choose whether or not you will suffer.  You get to choose if you suffer with Christ or without him. 

Don’t just learn something from every experience; learn something positive. Allen Neuharth

It doesn't matter, really, how great the pressure is; it only matters where the pressure lies.  See that it never comes between you and the Lord - then, the greater the pressure, the more it presses you to His breast.  Hudson Taylor

The worst of all afflictions is wasted affliction, and they are all wasted unless they teach us more of the reality and the blessedness of the love of Jesus Christ. Alexander Maclaren

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around.  Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.  I don't say, embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy.  But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.Oliver W. Holmes

The way out of life's frustrations is found, not by resenting our limitations, but by accepting the place of frustration as the sphere of God's purpose.

There are, in every situation, two factors:  there is what happens, and there is how we take what happens.  How we take what happens goes back to what kind of person we are, and what kind of belief we have about life as a whole.  If the whole scheme of life is not a scheme at all but a chaos, if there is not thread of purpose running through it all but only confusion, then our misfortunes are just part of the general mess.  But if God is, and if life is His creation, with meaning in the middle of it, then we may hope to discover a pattern which will both give coherence to it all and help to interpret any one event in the unfoldment. Sam Shoemaker

Adversity is the trial of principle.  Without it, a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not.

When you go through the furnace, God has his eye on the clock and his hand on the thermostat.

Untold suffering seldom is. Franklin Jones

All sunshine makes the desert.

I have never thought that Christians would be free of suffering.  For our Lord suffered.  And I have come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering.  For he knew that there is no life without suffering.Alan Paton

It is a fact of Christian experience that life is a series of troughs and peaks.  In his efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, God relies on the troughs more than the peaks.  And some of his special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. Peter Marshall

When we find ourselves in some kind of difficult situation, most of us pray, "Father, get me out of this!"  If nothing happens immediately, then we pray, "Father, when will I get out of this?"  But what we ought to be praying is, "Father, what should I get out of this?" Warren Wiersbe

Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties. C. H. Spurgeon

God uses broken things.  It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength.  It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume...It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.  Vance Havner

Suffering is the heritage of the bad, of the penitent, and of the Son of God.  Each one ends in the cross.  The bad thief is crucified, the penitent thief is crucified, and the Son of God is crucified.  By these signs we know the widespread heritage of suffering.  Oswald Chambers

No believer can cope with adversity unless Christ fills his horizon, sharpens his priorities and dominates his experience. Raymond Brown

What we do in a crisis always depends on whether we see the difficulties in the light of God, or God in the shadow of the difficulties.  G. Campbell Morgan

ADVICE

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't. Erica Jong

Please give me some good advice in your next letter.  I promise not to follow it. Edna St. vincent Millay

A philosopher is a person who gives other people advice about troubles he hasn't had.

AGING

Those who have spent their life looking for heaven gain a skip in their step as the city comes into view. Max Lucado

ANGER

The angry word is a blow struck at our brother, a stab at his heart; it seeks to hit, to hurt, and to destroy.  A deliberate insult is worse, for we openly disgrace our brother in the eyes of the world, causing others to despise him. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In the midst of great joy, do not promise anyone anything. In the midst of great anger, do not answer anyone's letter.

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be. Thomas a Kempis

Anger is a fire; it catches, destroys, and consumes.  Let us quench it by long-suffering and forbearance.  For as red hot iron dipped into water loses its fire, so an angry man falling in with a patient one does no harm to the patient man, but rather benefits him and is himself more thoroughly subdued. Chrysostom

One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, and another so placed that, however angry he gets, he will only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage the next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again: each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not. C. S. Lewis

ANXIETY

Yesterday's cares and tomorrows worries carried today make the strongest fall.

It is not the work that kills men; it is worry.  Work is healthy; you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. 

Worry is rust upon the blade.  It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, but the friction. Henry Beecher

It is not outward calamities, but a rebellious will that troubles us. Alexander Maclaren

ARGUMENTS

Soft words are hard arguments. 

The history of Christianity would have been far happier if we all had remembered one rule of intelligence -- not to believe a thing more strongly at the end of a bitter argument than at the beginning, not to believe it with the energy of the opposition rather than one's own. Charles Williams

Anybody who thinks there aren't two sides to every argument is probably in one.

When you sling mud, you lose ground. Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

If you can't convince them, confuse them.

ASSURANCE

The Christian who has the smile of God needs no status symbol. Leonard Ravenhill

Assurance is a believer's ark, where he sit s, Noah-like, quiet and still in the midst of all distractions and destructions, commotions and confusions. Thomas Brooks

The love I bear Christ is but a faint spark, but it is an emanation from himself; he kindled it, and he keeps it alive; and because it is his work, I trust many waters shall not quench it.  John Newton Quotes

I am wholly His; I am peculiarly His; I am universally His; I am eternally His. Thomas Brooks

Assurance is glory in the bud, it is the suburbs of paradise. Thomas Brooks

ATTITUDE

The last great human freedom is the freedom to change one's attitude in any circumstances. Victor Franckl

When was the last time you did something for the first time?

Are you bored with life?  Maybe your expecter has expired. John Maxwell

AUTHORITY

The notion that authority is entitled to reverence per se is the most subvervise of all notions in a free society.  "There is not worse heresy," Lord Acton wrote, "than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."  Authority is entitled only to the respect it earns, and not a whit more. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Authority is like soap.  The more you use it, the less you have. Juan C. Ortiz

BIBLE

The lack of scriptural knowledge is the source of all evils in the church. Chrysostom, 4th century church father

It be a certain truth, that none can understand [the prophets' and apostles'] writings aright, without the same Spirit by which they were written. George Fox

The Holy Scriptures are our letters from home. St. Augustine

Martin Luther said he would not be in paradise, if he might, without the Word of the Lord; but with the Word he could live in hell itself. 

The Word of God which demands of us not a discussion but a personal decision.  Paul Tournier

Kierkegaard said that most of us read the Bible the way a mouse tries to remove the cheese from the tray without getting caught.  Some of us have mastered that. 

Bible: Basic Information Before Leaving Earth

The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope, then he sees worlds beyond; but if he looks at his telescope, then he does not see anything but that. The Bible is a thing to be looked through, to see that which is beyond. ... Phillips Brooks 

Bread nourishes, not when it is looked at, but when it is eaten. A. Maclaren

A neglected Bible means a starved and strengthless spirit; a comfortless heart; a barren life; and a grieved Holy Ghost.  If the people, who are now perpetually running about to meetings for crumbs of help and comfort, would only stay at home and search their Bibles, there would be more happiness in the Church, and more blessing on the world.  FB Meyer

Apart from Jesus Christ we do not know what is our life, or our death, or God, or ourselves. Thus without the Scripture, which has Jesus Christ alone for its object, we can know nothing, and see only obscurity and confusion in the nature of God and in our own nature. Blaise Pascal

When you read God's Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, "It's talking to me, and about me." Soren Kierkegaard

Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ. Jerome, 4th century church father

I am a Christian because God says so, and I did what he told me to do, and I stand on God's Word, and if the Book goes down, I'll go with it. Billy Sunday

Never let good books take the place of the Bible.  Drink from the Well, not from the streams that flow from the well. Amy Carmichael

The “Bible says” equals “God says.”

BITTERNESS

An eye for an eye and everyone is blind. Gandhi

BOOKS

Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves. Jeremy Collier

BOREDOM

The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions. Ellen Glasgow

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.  Susan Ertz

CHANGE

Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often. J. H. Newman

CHARACTER

Character is what you are in the dark.

What we have been makes us what we are. John Dykes

In great matters men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small matters, as they are. Gamaliel Bradford

The way to find out about one man, I have often found, is to ask him about another.  Gerard Fay

CHILDREN

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things. Norman Douglas

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them. Do you think you love your children better than He who made them? Is not your love what it is because He put it into your heart first? Have you not often been cross with them? Sometimes unjust to them? Whence came the returning love that rose from unknown depths in your being, and swept away the anger and the injustice? You did not create that love. Probably you were not good enough to send for it by prayer. But it came. God sent it. He makes you love your children. George MacDonald

The value of parental affection lies larg ely in the fact that it is more reliable than any other affection.  One’s friends like one for one’s merits; one’s lovers for one’s charms.  If the merits or the charms diminish, the friends and lovers may vanish…Our parents love us because we are their children, and this is unalterable fact. Bertrand Russell

You don't raise heroes; you raise sons.  And if you treat them like sons, they'll turn out to be heroes, even if it's just in your own eyes. Walter Schirra

There is a widespread refusal to let children know that the source of much that goes wrong in life is due to our very own natures--the propensity of all men for acting aggressively, asocially, selfishly, out of anger, and anxiety.  Instead, we want our children to believe that, inherently, all men are good.  The children know that they are not always good; and often, even when they are, they would not prefer to be.  This contradicts what they are told by their parents, and therefore makes the child a master in his own eyes. Bruce Bettelheim

It is painful to think how often we neglect our children and then labor with agonizing prayer and heroic appeal for the conversion of men and women. F. B. Meyer

Children have never been good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. James Baldwin

Census-taker to harried housewife:  "I need the exact number of dependients, madam, not how many will be alive after their father gets home.

We don't own our children:  we hold them in trust for God, who gave them to us.  The 18 or 20 years of provision and oversight and training that we normally have, represent our fulfillment of that trust. Joseph Bayly

To our forefathers the Christian faith was an experience. To our fathers it was an inheritance.         To our generatio it is a convenience. To our children it is a nuisance.

The mother who plants her impressionable preschool child in front of the television set for the sake of her own convenience is making a mistake with irrevocable consequences. James Dobson

CHRIST

Jesus of Nazareth, without money and arms, conquered more millions than Alexander, Caesar, Mahomet, and Napoleon; without science and learning, He shed more light on things human and divine than all philosophers and schools combined; without the eloquence of schools, He spoke words of life such as never were spoken before or since, and produced effects which lie beyond the reach of any orator or poet; without writing a single line, He has set more pens in motion, and furnished themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned volumes, works of art and sweet songs of praise, than
the whole army of great men of ancient and modern times. Born in a manger, and crucified as a malefactor, He now controls the destinies of the civilized world, and rules a spiritual empire which embraces one-third of the inhabitants of the globe. There never was in this world a life so unpretending, modest, and lowly in its outward form and condition, and yet producing such extraordinary effects upon all ages, nations, and classes of men. The annals of history produce no other example of such complete and astonishing success in spite of the absence of those material, social, literary, and artistic
powers and influences which are indispensable to success for a mere man. Philip Schaff 

When Christ reveals Himself there is satisfaction in the slenderest portion, and without Christ there is emptiness in the greatest fulness. Alexander Grosse

Everything in Christ astonishes me.  His spirit overawes me, and his will confounds me.  Between him and whoever else in the world, there is no possible term of comparison.  He is truly a being by himself...I search in vain in history to find the similar to Jesus Christ, or anything which can approach the gospel.  Neither history, nor humanity, nor the ages, nor nature, offer me anything with which I am able to compare it or to explain it.  Here everything is extraordinary. Napoleon

A never-say-die Galilean who majors in stepping in when everyone else steps out. Max Lucado

Jesus was an architect who built bridges with wood from a Roman cross. Max Lucado

The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels...never concealed His tears.  He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city.  Yet He concealed something...He never restrained His anger.  He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell.  Yet He restrained something.  I say it with reverence: there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness.  There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray...There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.  GK Chesterton

Not Herod, not Caiaphas, not Pilate, not Judas ever contrived to fasten upon Jesus Christ the reproach of insipidity; that final indignation was left for pious hands to inflict.  To make of His story something that could neither startle, nor shock, nor terrify, nor excite, nor inspire a living soul is to crucify the Son of God afresh and put Him to an open shame.  Dorothy Sayers

What are we to make of Jesus Christ?  This is a question which has, in a sense, a frantically comic side.  For the real question is not what are we to make of Christ, but what is he to make of us.  The picture of a fly sitting, deciding what it is going to make of an elephant has comic elements about it. C. S. Lewis

If we seek strength, it lies in his dominion; if purity, in his conception; if gentleness, it appears in his birth.  For by his birth he was made like us in all respects that he might learn to feel our pain.  If we seek redemption, it lies in his passion; if acquittal, in his condemnation; if remission of the curse, in his cross; if satisfaction, in his sacrifice; if purification, in his blood; if reconciliation, in his descent into hell; if mortification of the flesh, in his tomb; if newness of life, in his resurrection; if immortality, in the same; if inheritance of the heavenly kingdom, in his entrance into heaven; if protection, if security, if abundant supply of all blessings, in his kingdom; if untroubled expectation of judgement, in the power given to him to judge. John Calvin

CHRIST-OBEDIENCE

An act of his own will and choice preceded all obligation as unto obedience.  He obeyed because he would, before because he ought. John Owen

The life Christ lived qualified him for the death he died.  And the death he died qualifies me to live the life he lived.  Ian Thomas

The sinlessness of Jesus does not consist in an absence of human weakness, but in an ever renewed v ictory over temptations.  Hering

CHRIST-AUTHORITY

Jesus demands greater allegiance than any dictator that ever lived. The difference is that Jesus has a right to it! Vance Havner

CHRIST-DEATH

The crucifixion did not become common in art until all who had seen a real one died off.

After calvary, peace was no longer to operate on the thin blade of truth or in the court of law, but in the torn heart of a God who had become human for us in Jesus Christ. Carlos Carretto

His wounds are not the sign that suffering is good, but that some things in life are good enough to put up with the suffering that may come as we live into them. Robert Morris

The message of the Cross of Christ is not that God will shield us from suffering, but that we can encounter God in our suffering, even as God has encountered us in human suffering. God knows our suffering. Coming into God's presence as sufferers, we can learn who we are, in our suffering and beyond suffering, and we can learn who God is, the God who suffers and the God who both transcends and transforms suffering. David Rensberger,

Whoever heard of a suffering God? The idea is plain daft. God is up in heaven, and there he will stay. But wouldn't it be wonderful if it were true? If God came to visit us, like a great king visiting his subjects? Or, even better, if he came among us as one of us, sharing our way of life, with all its tragedy, sorrows and grief? Alister E. McGrath

The cross is where God forgave his children without lowering his standards. Max Lucado

It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills a sparrow can hear the story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at all.  Dorothy Sayers

The temporary suffering of him who was eternal were a full compensation for the eternal suffering of them who were temporary. John Owen

Lewis reminded us that, as far as we know, it cost nothing at all to create all that is beautiful and attractive about our world, but it cost him the death of His Son on the cross to change the rebellious hearts of mankind.

Precisely how a man nailed to a cross 2,000 years ago, who claimed to be the Son of God, came to signify reality, in contradiction to the sawdust men of destiny with their fraudulent wars and revolutions and liberations, is something that can be understood, but not explained.  You either see it or you don't. Malcolm Muggeridge

Nothing but the death of Christ for us will be the death of sin in us. John Owen

The power that kept him on the cross was a far mightier one than would have been necessary to leave it.  It was not by the nails through his hands and feet that he was held...but by the cords of redeeming love and by the constraint of a divine design. James Stalker

Paul emphasizes three things about the cross.  On it Christ was crucified.  Through it the world is crucified to us.  Because of it we will be crucified to the world. Sinclair Ferguson

CHRIST-INCARNATION

It is no use saying that we are born 2,000 years too late to give room to Christ….Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts….And giving shelter or food to anyone who asks for it, or needs it, is giving it to Christ.

It is a profound irony that the Son of God visited this planet and one of the chief complaints against him was that he was not religious enough. Becky Pippert

The hinge of history is found on the door of a Bethlehem stable.

Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and out of time.  A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history; transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time.  A moment in time but time was made through that moment:  for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning. T. S. Eliot

"God is great," the cry of the Moslems, is a truth which needed no supernatural being to teach men.  That God is little, that is the truth which Jesus taught man, and we find at once so tender and so perplexing.  It is of the nature of love to be infinitely minute, as well as soaring in its imagination, and this nature is shown us by God. Father Nevelle Figgis

The hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle...And God who had been only a circumference was seen as a center. G. K. Chesterton

CHRIST-LOVE

Redeeming love is the last reality of the universe.  Love exhibited in Christ's death is not only worthy of all praise but also of having all the future committed unto it.

Alexander, Caesar, and Hannibal conquered the world but they had no friends...Jesus founded his empire upon love, and at this hour millions would die for him...He has won the hearts of men, a task a conqueror cannot do. Napoleon Bonaparte

CHRIST-RESURRECTION

Too vital to be lost in the mists of antiquity, too vital to be subjected to permanent misrepresentation, Jesus is apparently too vital to die. Ernest Tittle

O death, where is thy sting?  O grave, where is thy victory?  This is so true that even Satan cannot deny it.  Christ's resurrection and victory over sin, death and hell is greater than all heaven and earth.  You can never imagine his resurrection and victory so great but that in actuality it is far, far greater. Martin Luther

As a young man, D. L. Moody was called upon suddenly to preach a funeral sermon.  He hunted all through the 4 Gospels trying to find on e of Christ's funeral sermons, but searched in vain.  He found that Christ broke up every funeral He ever attended.  Death could not exist where He was.  When the dead heard His voice, they sprang to life.  Jesus said, "I am the resurrection and the life."

On Easter Sunday Christianity makes a definitive breach with the philosophies and religions of the world.  They have offered to Christ a niche in the world's pantheon of gods...but he claims the throne.  They cannot absorb him by making him one of many, or even the greatest of many.  In his resurrection glory he says, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given unto me.  Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations."  He calls all to Himself.  He claims to be the one Savior and Lord.

CHRISTIAN LIFE

What is needed...is a reckless abandonment to the Lord Jesus Christ-reckless and uncalculating abandonment with no reserve anywhere about it.  You cannot be sad if you are abandoned absolutely. Oswald Chambers

Do not desire crosses, unless you have borne well those laid on you; it is an abuse to long after martyrdom while unable to bear an insult patiently.  François de Sales

The "great commitment" is so much easier than the ordinary, everyday one--and can all too easily shut our hearts to the latter. A willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice can be associated with, and even produce, a great hardness of heart. Dag Hammarskjold 

To take up the cross of Christ is no great action done once for all; it consists in the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us. John Newman 

Why are we not more holy?  Chiefly because we are enthusiasts, looking for the end without the means.  John Wesley

We might well pray for God to invade and conquer us, for until He does, we remain in peril from a thousand foes. We bear within us the seeds of our own disintegration... The strength of our flesh is an ever present danger to our souls. Deliverance can come to us only by the defeat of our old life.  Safety and peace come only after we have been forced to our knees... So He conquers us and by that benign conquest saves  us for Himself. A. W. Tozer

It is not the bush that sustains the flame. It is God in the bush, and so, any old bush will do!  Tim Hansel

When we are in hand-to-hand conflict with the world, the flesh, and the devil himself, neat little Biblical confectionery is like shooting lions with a pea-shooter; God needs a man who will let go and deliver blows right and left as hard as he can hit, in the power of the Holy Ghost. Nothing but forked-lightning Christians will count. C. T. Studd

Nothing burneth in hell but self-will. Therefore it hath been said, Put off thine own will, and there will be no more hell. 

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.  Douglas Adams

It is a fact of Christian experience that life is a series of troughs and peaks.  In his efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, God relies on the troughs more than the peaks.  And some of his special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. Peter Marshall

One thief on the cross was saved, that none should despair; and only one, that none should presume. JC Ryle

We are like a bunch of bad photograpsh-overexposed and underdeveloped.

If I mistake, He will forgive me. I do not fear Him: I only fear lest, able to see and write these things, I should fail of witnessing and myself be, after all, a castaway -- no king but a talker: no disciple of Jesus, ready to go with Him to the death, but an arguer about the truth.  George Macdonald

To have God do his own work through us, even once, is better than a lifetime of human striving. Watchman Nee

The meaning of earthly existence lies, not as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul. Alexander Solzhenitsyn

He who knows his sins is much greater than he who makes someone rise from the dead.  He who can really cry one hour about himself is greater than he who teaches the whole world; he who knows his own weaknesses is greater than he who sees the angels.  Issac of Nineveh

God had only one Son without sin but He has no son without a cross. Thomas Manton

God does not bless great talents; he blesses Christ-likeness. M. McCheyne

Christ's kingdom will be advanced by those whose hands are dedicated, not those whose lips alone move.  Walter Brovald

There are no crown-wearers in heaven who were not cross-bearers below. C. H. Spurgeon

He who prepares for this life but not for eternity is wise for a moment but a fool forever.

The essential thing "in heaven and earth" is...that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living. Friedrich Nietzche

The beauty of discipleship is not that it is cost free, but that it is cost effective. Gretchen Gaebelein Hall

The cross of Christ destroyed the equation religion equals happiness. D. Bonhoeffer

We don’t wallow in the soul.  We care for it. Thomas More

Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.  C. C. Cotton

We do not have to live; we have only to be faithful. Vance Havner

Divine grace is not bestowed with the object of freeing men from their obligations but rather with that of supplying them with a powerful motive far more readily and gratefully discharging those obligations.  To make God's favor a ground of exemption from the performance of duty comes perilously near to turning his grace into lasciviousness. A. W. Pink

We should live each day as if Christ had died yesterday, rose again this morning, and is coming back tomorrow.  Alexander Maclaren

Be dogmatically true, obstinately holy, immovably honest, desperately kind, fixedly upright. C. H. Spurgeon

The first duty of every soul is to find not its freedom but its Master. P. T. Foresyth

Whatever a man has done, a man can do.  Whatever Jesus is, I may be. Alexander Maclaren

Pardon is the door; holiness of heart and life the pathway; the presence of God the blessedness of the Christian life.

God makes his ministers a flame of fire.  Am I ignitable?  God, deliver me from the dread asbestos of "other things."  Saturate me with the oil of thy Spirit that I may be a flame.  Make me thy fuel, Flame of God.  Jim Elliot

You will invest your life in something, or you will throw it away on nothing. Haddon Robinson

CHRISTIAINITY

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried. Chest erton

Christianity is a battle, not a dream. Wendell Phillips

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. C S Lewis

If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.  C. S. Lewis

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a package tour of the Absolute?…On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of tnt to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. Annie Dillard

Christianity is not psychology but it is better psychology than psychology.

A real Christian is an odd number anyway.  He feels supreme love for One who he has never seen; talks familiarly every day to Someone he cannot see; expects to go to heaven on the virtue of Another; empties himself in order to be full; admits he is wrong so he can be declared right; goes down in order to get up; is strongest when he is weakest; richest when he is poorest; and happiest when he feels the worst.  He dies so he can live; forsakes in order to have; gives away so he can keep; sees the invisible; herars the inaudible; and knows that which passeth knowledge. AW Tozer

I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense in it...We cannot blink the fact that gentle Jesus meek and mild was so stiff in His opinions and so inflammatory in His language that He was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbeted as a firebrand and a public danger.  Whatever His peace was, it was not the peace of an amiable indifference. Dorothy Sayers

The heart of religion lies in its personal pronouns. Martin Luther

Christianity is not a matter only of repenting and obtaining forgiveness, but of irrevocable commitment of life to a supernatural end.  William Manson

Christianity is not one ideology over against the other ideologies.  It is a life inspired by the Holy Spirit.  Its victories are nothing but victories over itself, not over others.  It propagates itself through humility and self-examination, not through triumphs.  Paul Tournier

This is the very essence of true religion--personally living with a personal Savior, personally trusting a personal Redeemer, personally crying out to a personal Intercessor, and receiving personal answers from a Person who loves us, and who manifests himself to us. C. H. Spurgeon

CHRISTMAS

The virgin birth has never been a major stumbling block in my struggle with Christianity; it's far less mind-boggling than the Power of all Creation stooping so low as to become one of us.  Madeleine L'Engle

Christmas is when God came down the stairs of heaven with a baby in his arms. R. Eugene Sterner

We live in a spiritually troubled time in history.  Christianity has gone over to the jingle-bell crowd.  Everyone is just delighted that Jesus has done all of the sorrowing, all of the suffering, all of the dying. AW Tozer

It's a tough job trying to make Christmas nonreligious...To eliminate Christ from Christmas you would have to destroy all the evidence-including the Michelangelos, the Rembrandts, Rubens, and da Vincis, the works of Beethoven, Haydn, Bach, Mozart, and Handel.  To search for the millions of bibles, translated into many languages and distributed around the world, would take quite a force.  The job would be too big for the FBI, the KGB, and Scotland Yard combined. Ruth Hackman

Some businessmen are saying this could be the greatest Christmas ever.  I always thought that the first one was. Art Fettig

If Jesus were born one thousand times in Bethlehem and not in me, then I would still be lost. Corrie Ten Boom

CHURCH

The Church has every excuse for getting itself disliked: none at all for escaping notice. Christopher Driver

Ananias and Sapphira hid their sin; Simon Magus did church work. G Campbell Morgan

The problem is not that the churches are filled with empty pews, but that the pews are filled with empty people. Charlie Shedd

I believe a very large majority of churchgoers are merely unthinking, slumbering worshipers of an unknown God. CH Spurgeon

Renewing the Church is like remodeling your house:  it takes longer than you hoped, costs more than you planned, and makes a bigger mess than you ever thought possible.  Paul Smith

The paradox of faith is that the church on fire is the church at rest. Sherwood Wirt

The church is the only cooperative society in the world that exists for the benefit of its non-members. William Temple

We do not want, as the newspapers say, a church that will move with the world.  We want a church that will move the world. Chesterton

Two Indians who had been watching a lighthouse go up came over to see the thing open on the big day.  It was all set up with the lights and the bell and the horn; but the day it was due to open, the worst fog of all fogs came in.  One Indian said to the other, "Light shine, bell ring, horn blow, but fog come in just the same."  We've never had more lights shining, and bells ringing, and horns blowing in the church than we have today.  We've never had more fog. Vance Havner

A walloping great congregation is fine and fun, but what most communities need is a couple of saints.  Martin Thornton

COMFORT

God doesn't comfort us just to make us comfortable, but to make us comforters.

The lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest and then becomes a host, and then a master. Khalil Gibran

COMMITMENT

When people do not mean business with Christ in their hearts they will not do business for Christ with their hands. Vance Havner

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without passion, without business, without entertainment, without care. It is then that he is empty, insufficient, dependent, ineffectual. From the depths of his soul now comes at once boredom, gloom, sorrow, chagrin, resentment and despair. Blaise Pascal

DL Moody one day heard these challenging words which marked the beginning of a new era in his life.  “The world has yet to see what God will do, with, and for, and through, and in, and by, the man who is fully and wholly consecrated to Him.”  Thought Moody, “He said ‘a man.’ He did not say a great man, nor a learned man, nor a rich man, nor a wise man, nor an eloquent man, nor a smart man, but simply ‘a man.’ I am a man, and it lives with the man himself whether he will, or will not, make that entire and full consecration.  I will try my utmost to be that man.

A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. John Stuart Mill

See that you buy the field where the Pearl is; sell all, and make a purchase of salvation. Think it not easy: for it is a steep ascent to eternal glory: many are lying dead by the way, slain with security. Samuel Rutherford

We the willing, led by the unknowing. are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.  We have been doing so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.

Wherever you are, be all there.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. Theodore Roosevelt

COMMUNICATION

Some people are like blotters--they soak it all in, but get it backwards.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said. Peter Drucker

He who can no longer listen to his brother will soon no longer be listening to God, either.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

People change and forget to tell each other. Lillian Hellman

CONFESSION

Confess YOUR sins--not your neighbors.

Confession is nothing but humility in action. Mother Teresa

CONSCIENCE

Cowardice asks the question: Is it safe? Consensus asks the question: Is it popular? Conscience ask: Is it right?   Martin Luther King, Jr

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil," it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil. Sydney Harris

Man's whole life is a continual contradiction of what he knows to be his duty.  In every department of life he acts in defiant opposition to the dicates of his conscience and his common sense. Leo Tolstoy

There is no pillow so soft as a good conscience.--French proverb

The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways:  by a change in life or by a change of conscience. Leo Tolstoy

CONSECRATION

Some are inclined to look upon consecration as an attainment and an end; its true value consists in its being a beginning. A. Murray

Secret to life is death; secret to wholeness is brokenness; secret to victory is surrender. 

CONTENTMENT

There is a life-attitude toward the will and purpose of Christ that is so quiet, so at peace with God, so at rest in His joy, so perfectly content that He is doing the best, that the lines in the face are smoothed out; the fever is gone from the restless eye; and the whole nature is still.  Rest in the Lord.  Wait patiently for Him.  Then share your experience with others who have their attitudinal focus. FB Meyer

Next to faith this is the highest art--to be content with the calling in which God has placed you.  I have not learned it yet. Martin Luther

CONVERSION

Conversion is to give as much of yourself as you can to as much of God as you can understand, and to do so every day. William Temple

The Kingdom of Heaven is not for the well-meaning: it is for the desperate. James Denney

True conversion is not only from wasteful sins, but from gainful sins--not only from those sins that are destructive to the secular interest, but from those that support and befriend it. Matthew Henry

The great temptation most of us face is to believe that very little has happened to us through grace.  We still stumble and fall far short of the high calling which is ours in Christ.  Scripture encourages us to hold a different perspective by enlarging our understanding of what God has done for us, and has begun to accomplish. Sinclair Ferguson

COURAGE

Whatever you do, you need courage.  Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you you are wrong. Ralph Emerson

Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel. Homer Simpson

The best way to escape a problem is to solve it.

Fear that has said its prayers.

Once a man is satisfied that he is in the center of God's plan and God is working out His will through him, that man is invincible.  Theodore Epp

God is not looking for great men, but for men who believe He is great. John Dunlap

CREATIVITY

Piercing the mundane to get to the marvelous. Bill Moyers

CRITICISM

If criticizing gives you pain, then do it;  If it gives you the slightest pleasure, keep your mouth shut.

This story was told of General Robert E. Lee:  Hearing General Lee speak in the highest terms to President Davis about a certain officer, another officer, greatly astonished, said to him, "General, do you know that the man of whom you speak so highly to the President is one of your bitterest enemies, and misses no opportunity to malign you?"  "Yes," replied General Lee, "but the President asked my opinion of him:  he did not ask for his opinion of me."

I want to be willing to make enemies because of my position but not because of my disposition. Jack Hyles

Get a friend to tell you your faults, or better still, welcome an enemy, who will watch you keenly and sting you savagely.  What a blessing such an irritating critic will be to a wise man, what an intolerable nuisance to a fool.  C. H. Spurgeon

I'm always the first to admit my mistakes.  Although with a wife, 3 kids, a mother-in-law and a boss--it's always a close race.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring--a south wind, not an east wind. Ralph Emerson

Whatever you have to say to people be sure to say it in words that will cause them to smile and you will be on pretty safe ground.  And when you do find it necessary to criticize someone, put your criticism in the form of a question which the other fellow is practically sure to have to answer in a manner that he becomes his own critic. John Wanamaker

Most of us would rather be ruined by praise than helped by criticism.

A true friend will put a finger on your faults without rubbing them in.

A true friend is someone who stabs you in the front.  Oscar Wilde

If one man calls you a donkey, pay him no mind.  If two men call you a donkey, get a saddle.

When we discern that people are not going on spiritually and allow the discernment to turn to criticism, we block our way to God.  God never gives discernment in order that we may criticize, but that we may intercede.  Oswald Chambers