Bess > Bess's Quotes

“Don't think you haven't lived long enough to have a story to tell.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me.”
― J.I. Packer, Knowing God

“Remember, leadership is the ability to motivate people to work harder, longer, and smarter, because the vision of the end goal has been painted so clearly.”
― Clay Scroggins, How to Lead When You're Not in Charge: Leveraging Influence When You Lack Authority

“God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him”
― John Piper

“To be right with God the judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is a greater.”
― J.I. Packer, Knowing God

“The world needs to see Christians burning, not with self-righteous fury at the sliding morals in our country, but with passion for God.”
― Kevin DeYoung

“When the focus becomes ‘What would Jesus do?’ instead of ‘What has Jesus done?’ the [conservative/liberal] labels no longer matter.”
― Michael S. Horton

“Sometimes, the best way to help someone is just to be near them.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“If we want to feel deeply about God, we must learn to think deeply about God.”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“Secularization—that is, the gradual conformity of our thinking, beliefs, commitments, and practices to the pattern of this fading age—is not just something that happens to the church; it is something that happens in the church. In fact, it’s difficult to think of secularism as anything other than a Christian heresy.”
― Michael S. Horton, Gospel Commission, The: Recovering God's Strategy for Making Disciples

“The gospel of submission, commitment, decision, and victorious living is not good news about what God has achieved but a demand to save ourselves with God’s help. Besides the fact that Scripture never refers to the gospel as having a personal relationship with Jesus nor defines faith as a decision to ask Jesus to come into our heart, this concept of salvation fails to realize that everyone has a personal relationship with God already: either as a condemned criminal standing before a righteous judge or as a justified coheir with Christ and adopted child of the Father.”
― Michael S. Horton

“People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.”
― D.A. Carson

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”
― Jim Elliot

“The Life of true holiness is rooted in the soil of awed adoration”
― J.I. Packer

“The issue of faith is not so much whether we believe in God, but whether we believe the God we believe in. (p.35)”
― R.C. Sproul, Knowing Scripture

“If the focus of our testimony is our changed life, we as well as our hearers are bound to be disappointed.”
― Michael S. Horton, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church

“Regardless of the official theology held on paper, moralistic preaching (the bane of conservatives and liberals alike) assumes that we are not really helpless sinners who need to be rescued but decent folks who need good examples, exhortations, and instructions.”
― Michael S. Horton, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church

“What would things look like if Satan really took control of a city? Over half a century ago, Presbyterian minister Donald Grey Barnhouse offered his own scenario in his weekly sermon that was also broadcast nationwide on CBS radio. Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia (the city where Barnhouse pastored), all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say "Yes, sir" and "No, ma'am," and the churches would be full every Sunday...where Christ was not preached.”
― Michael S. Horton, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
― A.W. Tozer

“There is no place for suffering in a life whose goals are determined by a hedonistic culture,”
― Michael S. Horton, A Place for Weakness: Preparing Yourself for Suffering

“Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you'll die of a misprint.”
― Markus Herz

“God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas but for scars.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
― C.S. Lewis

“We are saved by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone.”
― Martin Luther

“Salvation is not a reward for the righteous, it is a gift for the guilty.”
― Steven Lawson

“The gospel makes us extrospective, turning our gaze upward to God in faith and outward to our neighbor in love.”
― Michael S. Horton, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World