Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Know today that God approves of you. He's pleased with you. He may not always be pleased with your choices or some of the things you do, but when God looks at you, He sees His amazing creation.
We live in bodies that are fearfully and wonderfully made, yet they are not immune to illness and pain. We have hearts that are capable of experiencing great love, but sometimes they get broken.
I am a pastor, and I teach and preach the Bible to my congregation every week. But the Bible is not a manufacturer's handbook. Neither is it a science textbook nor a guidebook for public policy.
Would anyone choose Hell over Heaven? YES! Why? Pride. They don't want to go in the only way you can go in, on your knees. They don't want to admit they are a failure, that their life is a mess.
We want a crowd to make us feel important and liked. But why is getting a crowd our focus? Jesus never suggested that crowds were the goal. He never addresses getting your church to grow. Never.
The time you spend alone with God will transform your character and increase your devotion. Then your integrity and godly behavior in an unbelieving world will make others long to know the Lord.
Every Christian has unique opportunities to engage the most pressing social issues of our day by praying, proclaiming the gospel, and participating with God in all that he is doing in the world.
Jesus is no draughtsman of political blueprints, he is the one who vanquished evil through suffering. It looked as though evil had triumphed on the cross, but the real victory belonged to Jesus.
It's pride, plain and simple, that keeps me from giving God all the glory and keeping some of it for myself. It is a battle we all fight in some form or another, some of us daily or even hourly.
I was raised Christian after age 5, but I didn't really understand it until high school. A friend of mine invited me to his youth group. There I heard the gospel, understood it, and accepted it.
The argument that making contraceptives available to young people would prevent teen pregnancies is ridiculous. That's like offering a cookbook as a cure to people who are trying to lose weight.
All hurricanes are acts of God because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that.
God is not in a hurry to fix us. Our behavior is not his first priority. We are his first priority. Loving us, knowing us, affirming us, protecting us. That is his top goal and his main concern.
But to mean it when I say that I want my life to count for His glory is to drive a stake through the heart of self - a painful and determined dying to me that must be a part of every day I live.
Prayer adds an element of surprise to your life that is more fun than a surprise party or surprise gift or surprise romance. In fact, prayer turns life into a party, into a gift, into a romance.
God's love means that our Creator desires to have a relationship with us. God's holiness prevents him from having fellowship with us and, instead, demands the outpouring of his anger against us.
When God saved me, He gave me a thirst to learn and to read and to study. I thrived in college. I got a bachelor's degree in philosophy and then went to Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.
We are deeply conditioned against unconditionality because we've been told in a thousand different ways that accomplishment always precedes acceptance, that achievement always precedes approval.
Through its appropriation of "texts of terror" and especially through the application of those texts to the Jews, the Christian religion created the conditions for the oppression of Palestinians.
The secret of living a life of excellence is merely a matter of thinking thoughts of excellence. Really, it's a matter of programming our minds with the kind of information that will set us free.
(Discouragement) Can be temporary-or it can destroy our life. The choice is ours. If we refuse to deal with discouragement head-on, we are opening the door for it to completely dominate our life.
Do you realize the weight of the one who has invited us to follow him? He is worthy of more than church attendance and casual association; he is worthy of total abandonment and supreme adoration.
To make sure our convictions, views, and assumptions about our Creator stay based on biblical truth and not on popular consensus, we must continually check what we believe against the Scriptures.
Loving God more than anyone or anything else is the very foundation of being a disciple. If you want to live your Christian life to its fullest, then love Jesus more than anyone or anything else.
While I have no problem with the church adapting to the culture, we must ensure that we remain painstakingly true to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and that we remain obedient servants to His truths.
I believe that all of us are born heterosexual, physically created with a plumbing that's heterosexual, and created with the instincts and desires that are basically, fundamentally, heterosexual.
Once we see more of our need and understand more of what Christ has done for us, he will become more precious to us. And this, in turn, will enable our obedience far more than sheer grunt effort.
There is simply so much reason to believe the good news of Jesus Christ in history, in Scripture, as well as in our own experience that it would take a leap of faith not to believe in the gospel.
The idolatry the exists in a man's heart always wants to lead him away from his Savior and back to self-reliance no matter how pitiful that self-reliance is or how many times it has betrayed him.
God made every one of us a sexual being, and that is good. Attraction and arousal are the natural, spontaneous, God-given responses to physical beauty, while lust is a deliberate act of the will.
I believe that the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence. And fame is not for our own benefit, or notoriety is not for our own benefit, it's for leverage to do good.
Use "breath prayers" throughout the day, as many Christians have done for centuries. You choose a brief sentence or a simple phrase that can be repeated to Jesus in one breath: "You are with me."
And even when you can’t get seem to get your act together, your identity is secure and completely intact. Because in Christ, who you are matters infinitely more than anything you do or cannot do.
I was referred to Mike Jones from the concierge at a Marriott hotel when I asked for a masseur... It was during the massage that it started to become sensual, and that led to him masturbating me.
There is no better story in the Old Testament, or perhaps the whole Bible, for depicting the difference between the ladder-defined life and the cross-defined life than that of the Tower of Babel.
In our minds, rich is always the other person, the other family. Rich is having more than you currently have. If that is the case, you can be rich and not feel it. You can be rich and not know it.
It's the most exciting thing to watch God work when I've asked him about something, to listen to him and watch him work. It's like this friendship, and it just grows and grows and grows and grows.
Some people think that if they will do certain things, they will somehow earn the favor of God, but this misses the whole point of Christianity and ironically devolves into a me-centered approach.
The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door.
We are so afraid of silence that we chase ourselves from one event to the next in order not to have to spend a moment alone with ourselves, in order not to have to look at ourselves in the mirror.
The inerrancy debate is based on the belief that the Bible is the word of God, that the Bible is true because God made it and gave it to us as a guide to truth. But that's not what the Bible says.
When you read the New Testament, you see the Holy Spirit was supposed to change everything so that this gathering of people who call themselves Christians had this supernatural element about them.
And, these Islamic fundamentalists, these radical terrorists, these Middle Eastern monsters are committed to destroying the Jewish nation, driving her into the Mediterranean, conquering the world.
A disciple is one who thinks, feels and acts like Jesus Christ. It is being conformed to the image of Christ as Romans 8:28-29 states-that God's No.1 purpose in our lives is to make us like Jesus.
Three enemies that will weaken your ministry over time: Self-indulgence, bitterness, and carelessness. Strong people discipline their desires, restrain their reactions, and keep their commitments.
Only the gospel can truly save you. The gospel doesn't make bad people good; it makes dead people alive...the gospel is God's acceptance of us based on what Christ has done, not on what we can do.
We find Christ in all the Scriptures. In the Old Testament He is predicted, in the Gospels He is revealed, in Acts He is preached, in the epistles He is explained, and in Revelation He is expected.
The Bible reveals the Father's overall plan for the world and provides general guidelines for life. But how can we know His specific plans for us? Listening to God is essential to walking with God.
But then I realize there is never going to be a day when I stand before God and He looks at me and says, 'I wish you would have kept more for yourself.' I'm confident that God will take care of me.
You see, growing in grace doesn't mean doing more or greater things for God. True growth comes in doing the same things over and over, with more heart assurance that we're doing everything for Him.