Favorite Quotes #1

I have two full journals of quotes I've collected over the years. Here are a few of my favorites:

- God is more concerned about our character than our comfort. His goal is not to pamper us physically but perfect us spiritually. {Paul W. Powell}

- In America, Christians pray for the burden of suffering to be lifted from their backs. In the rest of the world, Christians pray for stronger backs so they can bear their suffering. It's why we look away from the bag lady on the street and to the displays in store windows. Why we prefer going to the movies instead of to hospitals and nursing homes. {Dave Dravecky}

- The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people. {Richard Foster}

- Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself. {Leo Tolstoy}

- A man prayed and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized tht prayer is listening. {Soren Kierkegaard}

- We don't need fasten your seat belt signs in our pews because we no longer fly. We're like a group of geese attending meetings every Sunday where we talk passionately about flying and then get up and walk home. {Tim Hansel}

- Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking. {A.W. Tozer}

- Ministry means the ongoing attempt to put one's own search for God, with all the moments of pain and joy, despair and hope, at the disposal of those who want to join this search but do not know how. {Henri Nouwen}

- A faith that moves mountains is a faith that expands horizons. It does not bring us into a smaller world full of easy answers, but into a larger one where there is room for wonder. {Rich Mullins}

- The world has yet to see what God can do with and for and through and in a man who is fully and wholly consecrated to Him." {Henry Varley}

- The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and continuity. {Martin Luther King, Jr.}

- Saints become saints by somehow clinging to the stubborn conviction that God deserves our trust, even when it looks like the world is caving in. {Philip Yancey}

- Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God himself. {Unamuno y Jugo}

- I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, abut because by it I see everything else. {C.S. Lewis}

- Life without Jesus is like a dry garden baking in the sun. It is foolish to want anything that conflicts with Jesus. What can the world give you without Jesus? His absence is hell, his presence, paradise. {Thomas a Kempis}

- He is no fool who agives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. {Jim Elliot}

- My dear Jesus, my Savior, is so deeply written in my heart, that I feel confident, that if my heart were to be cut open and chopped to pieces, the name of Jesus would be found on every piece. {Ignatius}

- Some Christians haven't even attempted to think about whether or not they would die for Jesus because they haven't really been living for Him. {D.C. Talk}

- 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 awake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. {Annie Dillard}

- The Christian leadership of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her vulnerable self...It is not a leadership of power and control, baut a leadership of powerlessness and humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest. {Henri Nouwen}

- Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes - the rest sit round it and pluck blackberries. {Elizabeth Barrett Browning}

- The single greatest cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable. {Brennan Manning}

More to come later.