It is altogether doubtful whether any man can be saved who comes to Christ for His help with no intention to obey Him. ~ AW Tozer

“The grace of God in the heart of man is a tender plant in a strange, unkindly soil.” – Robert Leighton

“Do not think you are getting no good from the Bible, merely because you do not see that good day by day. The greatest effects are by no means those which make the most noise, and are most easily observed. The greatest effects are often silent, quiet, and hard to detect at the time they are being produced….” ~ Bishop JC Ryle

‘…early in the fifth century, Saint Augustine noted that perceptive non-Christians really did know a great deal about ‘the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth’. Given such able observers, he held that it was ‘a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics”. - Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, p. 100.

“One of the most effective defense systems against God’s incursions has hitherto been organized religion. Various churches have provided a refuge for fugitives from God—His voice drowned in the chanting, His smell lost in the incense, His purpose obscured and confused in creeds, dogmas, dissertations…in vast cathedrals, as in little conventicles…one could get away from God.”  ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

“First & foremost we believe in the Bible-our foundation is in the Word of God. Its not the latest prophecy, but the Word of God that drives us…” ~ John Wimber

“If the Lord is my shepherd, my feeder, I may conclude I shall not want for anything that is really necessary and good for me.” – Matthew Henry

“The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton. In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart…The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.” – Frederick Buechner

Thou hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more, – a grateful heart;
Not thankful when it pleaseth me,
As if Thy blessings had spare days,
But such a heart whose pulse may be Thy praise.

~George Herbert

“Truth comes in two formats: enlightenments and collisions with reality.” – unknown

“Fortitude without justice is a source of evil.” – St. Thomas Aquinas

“Satan’s accusation of unforgivable guilt is designed to make us lose confidence in the future through losing our confidence in God.  Yet God answers the accusation in just one word – one name – one act that has forever established His love and forgiveness:  Jesus!  In Jesus we are not only good, we are great.  We are not only strong, we have the entire arsenal and might of heaven for our defense.  So why carry a load of guilt when we can repent and be forgiven?  Why worry when we can pray?  When we know that Jesus has made things right, that He has given us the power to do right, that in the final settlement all will be right, we can rest in Him.  We can rest in His love and rejoice in the midst of the transient troubles of our human existence.” – Moishe Rosen

“We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.” – Wendell Berry

“It is [the Christians'] philanthropy toward strangers, the care they take of the graves of the dead, and the affected sanctity with which they conduct their lives that have done [the] most to spread their atheism.” – Roman Emperor Julian (the Apostate)

“Anglicanism is a very positive form of Christian belief…Its challenge can be summed up in the phrase, ‘Show us anything clearly set forth in Holy Scripture that we do not teach, and we will teach it; show us anything in our teaching and practice that is plainly contrary to Holy Scripture, and we will abandon it.” – Stephen Neill

“If you’d been born in Morocco, you wouldn’t be a Christian.”

“Perhaps. But had you been born in Morocco you wouldn’t be a relativist.” – Tim Keller, The Reason for God

“The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence.” - Alister McGrath

“A church that can’t worship must be entertained; and men who can’t lead a church to worship must provide entertainment.”  – A. W. Tozer

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it…” – Albert Einstein

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil. – CS Lewis

“When I am consumed by my problems – stressed out about my life, my family, and my job – I actually convey the belief that I think the circumstances are more important than God’s command to always rejoice.” – Francis Chan

You may never know that JESUS is all you need, until JESUS is all you have.

- Corrie Ten Boom

“A very strong proof of this destruction of death and its conquest by the cross is supplied by a present fact, namely this. All the disciples of Christ despise death; they take the offense against it and, instead of fearing it, by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ trample on it as on something dead. Before the divine sojourn of the Saviour, even the holiest of men were afraid of death, and mourned the dead as those who perish. But now that the Saviour has raised His body, death is no longer terrible, but all those who believe in Christ tread it underfoot as nothing, and prefer to die rather than to deny their faith in Christ, knowing full well that when they die they do not perish, but live indeed, and become incorruptible through the resurrection.”

-St. Athanasius – On the Incarnation. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 57)

“I confess the Cross, because I know of the Resurrection.” – St. Cyril of Jersualem.

Who can say what power a Church could develop and exercise, if it gave itself to the work of prayer day and night for the coming of the kingdom, for God’s power on His servants and His word, for the glorifying of God in the salvation of souls? Most Churches think their members are gathered into one simply to take care of and build up each other. They know not that God rules the world by the prayers of His saints; that prayer is the power by which Satan is conquered; that by prayer the Church on earth has disposal of the powers of the heavenly world. They do not remember that Jesus has, by His promise, consecrated every assembly in His Name to be a gate of heaven, where His Presence is to be felt, and His Power experienced in the Father fulfilling their desires. – Andrew Murray

“It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things; but to convert rebellious wills cost him crucifixion“ – C. S. Lewis

“As we begin it, as we make the first step into the ‘bright sadness’ of Lent, we see — far, far away — the destination. It is the joy of Easter, it is the entrance into the glory of the Kingdom. And it is this vision, the foretaste of Easter, that makes Lent’s sadness bright and our lenten effort a ‘spiritual spring’. For we may then understand, that the liturgical traditions of the Church, all its cycles and services, exist, first of all, in order to help us recover the vision and the taste of that new life which we so easily lose and betray, so that we may repent and return to it.” – Alexander Schmemman

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time.  Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?  ~G.K. Chesterton

There is no such thing as gratitude unexpressed.  If it is unexpressed, it is plain, old-fashioned ingratitude.  ~Robert Brault

“And pray ye without ceasing on behalf of other men. For there is in them hope of repentance that they may attain to God. See, then, that they be instructed by your works, if in no other way.” - St. Ignatius of Antioch’s Letter to the Ephesians

“Physical growth is the function of time. Intellectual growth is the function of learning. Spiritual growth is neither a function of time or learning but it is a function of obedience.” – John Bevere

“We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way and pray another.” – William Law.

Thou hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more, – a grateful heart;
Not thankful when it pleaseth me,
As if Thy blessings had spare days,
But such a heart whose pulse may be Thy praise.
~George Herbert

“It is not for us to imagine that we can prove the truth of Christianity by our own arguments; nobody can prove the truth of Christianity except the Holy Spirit, by his own almighty work of renewing the blinded heart.” – J.I. Packer, Knowing God, pg 71.

“Unless you prove to me by Scripture and plain reason that I am wrong, I cannot and will not recant.  My conscience is captive to the Word of God.  To go against conscience is neither right nor safe.  Here I stand.  I can do no other.  God help me.  Amen.”  – Martin Luther

It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent connection — the world and the Christian tradition. I had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly. I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world — it had evidently been meant to go there — and then the strange thing began to happen. When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. – GK Chesteron

“Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you’d be safer to stick to the papers. You’ll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.” – C. S. Lewis, from “The Seeing Eye” in Christian Reflections

“The Christian must learn to make a synthesis between his duties as a citizen and his religious practices. There must be no divorce between these two dimensions of his life…. We can also in this light see the mistake of politicians who regard the Church as interfering in politics when the Pope or the Bishops speak on… abortion, strange new definitions of family, the rights of workers, the education of children or what moral standards should guide the mass media. While the Church has no mandate from Christ to produce recipes for the solution of political or economic questions, the Church has the duty to invoke the light of the Gospel on various areas of human endeavor, on matters of right and wrong and on the morality of human acts in general.” – Francis Cardinal Arinze

“I believe that we were each created to live an adventure, to live beyond those things that are merely handed to us on a day-to-day basis…A man much wiser than me once said, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” If my life is to be a work of art, and if yours is too, we can’t allow ourselves to remain untested. We can’t stay in a place that requires no risk, no danger, no passion, no faith, no vision. To do so would be to live something less than the life that God gave us.”

- Shun Fong Lee

“Meditation is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself, the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God. It is an activity of holy thought, consciously performed in the presence of God, under the eye of God, by the help of God, as a means of communion with God.”

- J.I Packer, Knowing God

“Fear will always knock on your door. Just don’t invite it in for dinner. And for heaven’s sake, don’t offer it a bed for the night.”

- Max Lucado

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.

-Corrie ten Boom

“God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature”

- C.S. Lewis

“When the only verse of the Christmas story you identify with is ‘They came with haste,’ it’s time to reevaluate the season.”

- Alice N. Daniels

Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life’s problems fall into place of their own accord.

- J.I. Packer, Knowing God, pg. 34