Randy Alcorn - “God is grooming us for leadership. He’s watching to see how we demonstrate our faithfulness. He does that through his apprenticeship program, one that prepares us for Heaven. Christ is not simply preparing a place for us; he is preparing us for that place.”
Randy Alcorn - "The cost of redemption cannot be overstated. The wonders of grace cannot be overemphasized. Christ took the hell He didn't deserve so we could have the heaven we don't deserve."
Randy Alcorn - "Tomorrow's character is made out of today's thoughts. Temptation may come suddenly, but sin does not."
Ravi Zacharias - "As questioners, we think we understand evil and its nature. We only do to a limited extent - and it is like seeing a candle when God sees the devastating power of evil as a lightning bolt to the soul. We only grasp in small measure how heinous evil is. We look at the symptoms; God looks at the disease. We look at the rape as a violation of one person; God looks at the violation of the one as the violation of the very image of God. We look at moral issues that hurt society; God looks at the profane heart that desecrates everything in the process. We look at laws that will make life mutually livable; God looks at the regenerate heart that will make life in itself pleasurable."
Ravi Zacharias - "Having killed God, the atheist is left with no reason for being, no morality to espouse, no meaning to life, and no hope beyond the grave."
Ravi Zacharias - "I have little doubt that the single greatest obstacle to the impact of the gospel has not been its inability to provide answers, but the failure on our part to live it out."
Ravi Zacharias - "Love is a commitment that will be tested in the most vulnerable areas of spirituality. a commitment that will force you to make some very difficult choices. It is a commitment that demands that you deal with your lust, your greed, your pride, your power, your desire to control, your temper, your patience and every area of temptation that the Bible clearly talks about. It demands the quality of commitment that Jesus demonstrates in His relationship to us."
Ravi Zacharias - "To allow God to be God we must follow Him for who He is and what He intends, and not for what we want and what we prefer."
Ravi Zacharias - "The denial of an objective moral law, based on the compulsion to deny the existence of God, results ultimately in the denial of evil iteself."
Ray Stedman - “Admire them. There’s nothing wrong with admiring others. Study their method; learn from their mistakes; take note of what made them who they are. You can even emulate a few of their qualities. But never attempt to be them.”
Richard Baxter - "Fe men are apt to believe that which they would not have to be true, and fewer would have that to be true, which they apprehend to be against them."
Richard Baxter - "It is true, that men may have Christ whenever they are willing to comply with His terms. But if you are not willing now, how can you think you shall be willing hereafter?"
Richard Baxter - "Till men are deeply humbled, they can part with Christ and Salvation for a lust, for a little wordly gain, for that which is less than nothing. But when God hath enlightened their consciences, and broken their hearts, then they would give a world for Christ."
Richard Baxter - "'Tis hard preaching a stone into tears, or making a rock to tremble."
Richard Baxter - "The devils never had a Savior offered to them, but you have; and do you yet make light of Him?"
Richard Baxter - "The heart is naturally hard, and grows harder by custom in sin, especially by long abuse of mercy, neglect of the means of grace, and resisteing the spirit of grace."
Richard Baxter - "What we most value, we shall think no pains too great to gain."
Richard Chenevix Trench - “[We must not] conceive of prayer as though it were an overcoming of God’s reluctance, when it is, in fact, a laying hold of his highest willingness.”
Reinhold Niebuhr - "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference..."
Richard Foster - "And so I urge you to still every motion that is not rooted in the Kingdom."
Richard Foster - "Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things."
Richard Foster - "He is inviting you - and me - to come home, to come home to where we belong, to come home to that for which we were created. His arms are stretched out wide to receive us. His heart is enlarged to take us in."
Richard Foster - "In intellectual honesty, we should be willing to study and explore the spiritual life with all the rigor and determination we would give to any field of research."
Richard Foster - "Jesus Christ and all the writers of the New Testament call us to break free of mammon lust and live in joyous trust... They point us toward a way of living in which everything we have we recieve as a gift, and everything we have is cared for by God, and everything we have is available to others when it is right and good. This reality frames the heart of Christian simplicity. It is the means of liberation and power to do what is right and to overcome the forces of fear and avarice."
Richard Foster - "Today the heart of God is an open wound of love. He aches over our distance and preoccupation. He mourns that we do not draw near to Him. He grieves that we have forgotten Him. He weeps over our obsession with muchness and manyness. He longs for our presence."
Richard Lewontin - "We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so-stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, the materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
Rick Husband - "Don't die before your dead! Don't let anything stand in your way of God's appointed purpose for your life."
Rick Husband - "I try to be the best husband and father I possibly can. And it doesn't mean I get to spend as much time with my family as I'd like, but I do the best I can. Even if you do get to be an astronaut and get to go and do a lot of interesting things, at some point that will come to an end. If in the process you short change your family or compromise your values along the way, when you get through on the other side, it won't really be worth it. At least not to me."
Robert Boyle - "Our Saviour would love at no less rate than death; and from the supereminent height of glory, stooped and debased Himself to the sufferance of the extremest of indignities, and sunk himself to the bottom of abjectness, to exalt our condition to the contrary extreme."
R. C. Sproul - "I don't always feel His presence. But God's promises do not depend upon my feelings; they rest upon His integrity."
R. C. Sproul - "It's dangerous to assume that because a man is drawn to holiness in his study that he is thereby a holy man. I am sure that the reason that I have a deep hunger to learn of the holiness of God is precisely because I am not holy."
R. C. Sproul - "No Christian can avoid theology. Every Christian has a theology. The issue, then, is not, dowe want to have a theology? That's a given. The real issue is, do we have a sound theology.? Do we embrace true or false doctrine?"
R. C. Sproul - "Unbelief is judged by Jesus not as an intellectual error but as a hostile act of prejudice against God himself."
Rodney 'Gypsy' Smith - "There are five Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the Christian, and some people will never read the first four."
Robert Jastrow - “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak. As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Ronald Reagan - "America was founded by people who believed that God was their rock of safety. I recognize we must be cautious in claiming that God is on our side, but I think it's all right to keep asking if we're on His side."
Ronald Reagan - "Government must not supersede the will of the people or the responsibilities of the people. The function of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves."
Ronald Reagan - "I know that it is often difficult to stand up for one's beliefs when they are being harshly challenged. But as one who has seen many challenges over a long lifetime, I can assure you that personal faith and conviction are strengthened, not weakened, in adversity."
Ronald Reagan - "In 1962, the Supreme Court in the New York prayer case banned the... saying of prayers. In 1963, the Court banned the reading of the Bible in our public schools. From that point on, the courts pushed the meaning of the ruling ever outward, so that now our children are not allowed voluntary prayer. We even had to pass a law - pass a special law in the Congress just a few weeks ago - to allow student prayer groups the same access to school rooms after classes that a Young Marxist Society, for example, would already enjoy with no opposition... The 1962 decision opened the way to a flood of similar suits. Once religion had been made vulnerable, a series of assaults were made in one court after another, on one issue after another. Cases were started to argue against tax-exempt status for churches. Suits were brought to abolish the words 'Under God' from the Pledge of Allegiance, and to remove 'In God We Trust' from public documents and from our currency. Without God there is no virtue because there is no prompting of the conscience... without God there is a coarsening of the society; without God democracy will not and cannot long endure... If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a Nation gone under."
Ronald Reagan - "The family has always been the cornerstone of American society. Our families nurture, preserve, and pass on to each succeeding generation the values we share and cherish, values that are the foundation for our freedoms. In the family we learn our first lessons of God and man, love and discipline, rights and responsibilities, human dignity and human frailty. Our families give us daily examples of these lessons being put into practice. In raising and instructing our children, in providing personal and compassionate care for the elderly, in maintaining the spiritual strength of religious commitment among our people - in these and other ways, America's families make immeasurable contributions to America's well-being. Today more than ever, it is essential that these contributions not be taken for granted and that each of us remember that the strength of our families is vital to the strength of our nation."
Ronald Reagan - "I know that it is often difficult to stand up for one's beliefs when they are being harshly challenged. But as one who has seen many challenges over a long lifetime, I can assure you that personal faith and conviction are strengthened, not weakened, in adversity."
Ronald Reagan - “Sometimes when I'm faced with an atheist, I am tempted to invite him to the greatest gourmet dinner that one could ever serve, and when we have finished eating that magnificent dinner, to ask him if he believes there's a cook.”
Roger Williams - "Having bought truth dear, we must not sell it cheap, not the least grain of it for the whole world."
Roger Williams - "When they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, and made his garden a wilderness, as at this day. And that therefore if He will e'er please to restore His garden and paradise again, it must be of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world...and that be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the World."
Roy Lessin - "Just think, you're not here by chance, but by God's choosing. His hand formed you and made you the person you are. He compares you to no one else - you are one of a kind. You lack nothing that His grace can't give you. He has allowed you to be here at this time in history to fulfill His special purpose for this generation."
Ralph Waldo Emerson - "God offers every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take what you please - you can never have both."