One frequently meets passersby with music emanating from transistor radios on their persons. Lacking music in our hearts, we carry it in our pockets!

—Vance Havner in
The Vance Havner
Quote Book

Jesus went to Jerusalem one Passover holiday and met a man who had waited thirty-eight years at the Bethesda pool for a healing. Tradition had it that every so often an angel of the Lord would stir the waters and whoever stepped in first would be cured. For thirty-eight years, this man had reached out for a healing only to be muscled aside by someone bigger and faster.

Some folks say this man didn't want to be healed, or else he would have pushed other folks aside and hustled into that pool himself. I say true patience is so scarce, we're apt to confuse it with apathy. There's a load of difference between the two. Apathy curls up into self-pity when times get hard. Patience quietly waits its turn, trusting that God will get around to making things right in his perfect time.

—Philip Gulley in
Home Town Tales

Those who seek happiness too intensely will have little of it.

—Calvin Miller in
The Taste of Joy

Christians do not see themselves as wicked; they do not see their righteousness as filthy rags; they do not see themselves as needing to be in a state of ongoing confession and repentance. The result is that the body of Christ is, in large part, suffering from the power-draining effect of a universally unconfessed sin … the vanity of self-righteousness!

—Jim Russell in
Awakening the Giant

But where was I to start? The world is so vast, I shall start with the country I know best, my own. But my country is so very large. I had better start with my town. ...