Get On Board, Little Children
You know what a lot of religious people are like? They are like a lot of people sitting around a railroad station thinking they are on a train. Everybody is talking about travel, and you hear the names of stations and you have got tickets, and there is the smell of baggage around you and a great deal of stir, and if you sit there long enough you almost think you are on a train. But you are not. You only start to get converted at that point where you get on the train and get pulled out of the station. And you do get pulled out; you do not walk out.
—Sam Shoemaker, in a July 1955 speech commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous
Playing God
There are two sins of man that are bred in the bone, and that continually come out in the flesh. One is self-dependence and the other is self-exaltation. It is very hard, even for the best of men, to keep themselves from the first error. The holiest of Christians, and those who understand best the gospel of Christ, find in themselves a constant inclination to look to the power of the creature, instead of looking to the power of God and the power of God alone.
—C. H. Spurgeon in Sermons on Sovereignty
Ultimate profit
For the Christian, the bottom line can never be the bottom line.
—Richard Foster in Money, Sex and Power
Remedial learning
There are no graduates in the school of human pain.… All too often we will be faced with the necessity of relearning faith’s lessons and of remaking our commitments and renewing our vows. Truths of Scripture that we thought we knew not only by heart but by experience will have to be reapplied to our souls to meet our daily need.
—Margaret Clarkson in Grace
Grows Best in Winter
Looking unto Jesus
I looked on Jesus and the dove of peace entered my heart. I looked at the dove of peace; and lo … off he went.
—Corrie Ten Boom in Each New Day
Whatever happened to embarrassment?
We have lost the invaluable faculty of being shocked—a faculty which has hitherto almost distinguished the Man or Woman from the beast or child.
—C. S. Lewis in Present
Concerns: Essays by C. S. Lewis
Prayer is no wish list
Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you must ask to attend to them.
—Dag Hammerskjöld in Markings
Misguided requests
Oh, I wish that God had not given me what I prayed for! It was not so good as I thought.
—Johanna Spyri in Heidi
Walk the talk
To many Christians, Christ is little more than an idea, or at best an ideal—He is not a fact. Millions of professed believers talk as if He were real and act as if He were not. Our actual position is always to be discovered by the way we act, not by the way we talk.
—A. W. Tozer in This World: Playground or Battleground?
Two sides of the same coin
I believe that justice and mercy are simply one and the same thing; without justice to the full there can be no mercy, and without mercy to the full there can be no justice. Such is the mercy of God that he will hold his children in the consuming fire of his distance until they pay the uttermost farthing, until they drop the purse of selfishness with all the dross that is in it, and rush home to the Father and the Son, and the brethren—rush inside the center of the life-giving Fire whose outer circles burn.
—George MacDonald in Discovering the Character of God
Severe handicaps
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
—Albert Einstein in Out of My Later Years
Where else can we go?
I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom, and that of all about me, seemed insufficient for the day.
—Abraham Lincoln, from Inspiring Quotations
