- “We viewed our neighbors as recipients instead of friends. And without creating community, we had failed to see the larger systemic problems holding our neighbors back.”— Luke Edwards, Becoming Church
- “Jesus was not a man for others. He was one with others. There is a world of difference in that. Jesus didn’t seek the rights of lepers. He touched the leper even before he got around to curing him. He didn’t champion the cause of the outcast. He was the outcast. He didn’t fight for improved conditions for the prisoner. He simply said, ‘I was in prison.’ The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place—with the outcast and those relegated to the margins.” – Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
- “Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One who is leading.” – Oswald Chambers
- “Every day people are straying away from church and going back to God.” – Lenny Bruce
- “Jesus didn’t tell us to become acquaintances with our neighbors; he called us to love them, and that means we need to have an actual relationship with them.” – The Art of Neighboring, by Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon
- “Your nature is a hard thing to change; it takes time. One of the extraordinary transferences that happen in your spiritual life is not that your character flaws go away but they start to work for you. A negative becomes a positive: you’ve a big mouth: you end up a singer. You’re insecure: you end up a performer who needs applause. I have heard of people having life-changing, miraculous turn-arounds, people set free from addiction after a single prayer, relationships saved where both parties ‘let go, and let God’. But it was not like that for me. For all that ‘I was lost, I am found’, it is probably more accurate to say, ‘I was really lost, I’m a little less so at the moment.’ And then a little less and a little less again. That to me is the spiritual life. The slow reworking and rebooting of a computer at regular inervals, reading the small print of the service manual. It has slowly rebuilt me in a better image. It has taken years, though, and it is not over yet.” – Bono
- “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” says Paul. And we are most in line with the Spirit, most faithfully obedient, when instead of trying to manipulate people into faith, we simply live in that freedom and let the Spirit do the work of transformation.”
– Mark Galli, Chaos and Grace: Discovering the Liberating Work of the Holy Spirit
- “God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supplies.” –Hudson Taylor
- “Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.” – Peter Marshall
- “When Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.” – New Testament scholar N. T. Wright
- “After learning to love God (worship), learning to love others is the second purpose of your life.” – Rick Warren
- “Whenever God calls us to a task, He will equip us and enable us to complete the task.” – Michael Youssef
- “You are the only Bible some unbelievers will ever read.” –John MacArthur
- “We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.” –Chuck Swindoll
- “Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” – Matthew 9:37-38
- “Sometimes I think it is easier for you and me to believe Jesus is God now that He is in heaven than it might have been back when He was walking around on earth. If you would have seen Jesus do miracles, and if you were one of those who were healed by Him or if you were one of the disciples, then it would have been easier, but for most people, especially the Jews, Jesus would have been a stumbling block.At the same time, however, we are at a disadvantage because the Jesus that exists in our minds is hardly the real Jesus. The Jesus on CNN, the Jesus in our books and in our movies, the Jesus that is a collection of evangelical personalities, is often a Jesus of the suburbs, a Jesus who wants you to be a better yuppie, a Jesus who is extremely political and supports a specific party, a Jesus who has declared a kind of culture war in the name of our children, a Jesus who worked through the founding fathers to begin America, a Jesus who dresses very well, speaks perfect English, has three points that fulfill any number of promises and wants you and me to be, above all, comfortable. Is this the real Jesus?Is Jesus sitting in the lifeboat with us, stroking our backs and telling us we are the ones who are right and one day these other infidels are going to pay, that we are the ones who are going to survive and the others are going to be thrown over because we Calvinist, Armenians, Baptist, Methodist, Catholics; because we Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, or liberals; because we attend a big church, a small church, an ethnically diverse church, a house church, or is Jesus acting in our hearts to reach out to the person who isn’t like us….the oppressed, the poor, the unchurched…….and to humble ourselves, give of our money, build communities in love, give our time, our creativity, get on our knees before our enemies in humility, treating them as Scripture says, as people who are more important than we are? The latter is the Jesus of Scripture; the former, which is infinitely more popular in evangelical culture, is a myth sharing a genre with unicorns.” – From “Searching for God Knows What” by Donald Miller
- “What I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do.” – Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz
- “I loved the fact that it wasn’t my responsibility to change somebody, that it was God’s, that my part was just to communicate love and approval.” – Donald Miller, Blue Like Jaz
- “Imagine how much a man’s life would change if he trusted that he was loved by God.” ― Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
- “…I want my spirituality to rid me of hate, not give me reason for it.” – Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz
- “Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon.” – Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz
- “…to be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously. And a person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because he can’t accept who God is; a Being that is love. We learn that we are lovable or unlovable from other people…That is why God tells us so many times to love each other.” – Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz
- “I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn’t. It’s a chocolate thing.” – Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz
- “And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it.” – Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz
- “At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of any of our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong we are still going to be okay. And wonder is that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow. I don’t think there is any better worship than wonder.” – Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz
- “I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again. God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.” – Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz
- “Christian spirituality was not a children’s story. It wasn’t cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment.” – Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz
- “As a human, I am flawed in that it is difficult for me to consider others before myself. It feels like I have to fight against this force, this current within me that, more often than not, wants to avoid serious issues and please myself, buy things for myself, feed myself, entertain myself, and all of that.” – Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz
- “Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them.” – Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz
- • “And I found Jesus very disturbing, very straightforward. He wasn’t diplomatic, and yet I felt like if I met Him, He would really like me. Don, I can’t explain how freeing that was, to realize that if I met Jesus, He would like me. I never felt like that about some of the Christians on the radio. I always thought if I met those people they would yell at me. But it wasn’t like that with Jesus.”- Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz
- “…if I do not introduce people to Jesus, then I don’t believe Jesus is an important person. It doesn’t matter what I say.” – Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz
- It is the duty of every Christian to be Christ to his neighbor. –Martin Luther
- If your Gospel isn’t touching others, it hasn’t touched you! –Curry R. Blake
- How you believe God perceives people will determine how you respond to them. –Jacquelyn K. Heasley
- Some wish to live within the sound of a chapel bell; I wish to run a rescue mission within a yard of hell. — C.T. Studd
- I have but one candle of life to burn, and I would rather burn it out in a land filled with darkness than in a land flooded with light. – John Keith Falconer
- The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become. — Henry Martyn,
- It is now possible to live a “christian life” without doing the things that Jesus commanded us to do. “We have hired people to go into all the world, to visit those in prison, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to care for widows and orphans. The average Christian doesn’t have to do it.–Cal Thomas
- Sympathy is no substitute for action.– David Livingstone,
- Use your ministry to build people, not people to build your ministry. –Jacquelyn K. Heasley
- Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin, and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on earth. –John Wesley
- If you are walking with Jesus, in the Spirit, you need not fear going too far. No believer has gone as far as God wants him to go.–A. A. Allen
- ‘If we are devoted to the cause of humanity, we shall soon be crushed and broken-hearted, for we shall often meet with more ingratitude from men than we would from a dog; but if our motive is love to God, no ingratitude can hinder us from serving our fellow men. –Oswald Chambers
- I don’t know how your theology works, but if Jesus has a choice between stained glass windows and feeding starving kids in Haiti, I have a feeling he’d choose the starving kids in Haiti.–Tony Campolo
- Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us daily. — Sally Koch
- As a large fire begins with kindling of small twigs and branches, even so a large revival is preceded by the prayers of a few hidden seemingly insignificant souls. –Gary Amirault
- Evangelization is a process of bringing the gospel to people where they are, not where you would like them to be… When the gospel reaches a people where they are, their response to the gospel is the church in a new place…–Vincent Donovan
- “Tolerance isn’t about not having beliefs. It’s about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.”
— Timothy J. Keller
- “Friendship is a deep oneness that develops when two people, speaking the truth in love to one another, journey together to the same horizon.” –Timothy J. Keller
- “Having spent time around “sinners” and also around purported saints, I have a hunch why Jesus spent so much time with the former group: I think he preferred their company. Because the sinners were honest about themselves and had no pretense, Jesus could deal with them. In contrast, the saints put on airs, judged him, and sought to catch him in a moral trap. In the end it was the saints, not the sinners, who arrested Jesus.”
– David Kinnaman, unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity…and Why It Matters
- “Jesus . . . wants us to see that the neighbor next door or the people sitting next to us on a plane or in a classroom are not interruptions to our schedule. They are there by divine appointment. Jesus wants us to see their needs, their loneliness, their longings, and he wants to give us the courage to reach out to them.” – Rebecca Manley Pippert
- “We will never change the world by going to church. We will only change the world by being the church.”
- “A faith without some doubts is like a human body with no antobodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask the hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.” ― Tim Keller