Live Dead Joy Quotes

“We have made Christmas about coming home and being comfortable. Jesus’ approach to Christmas was to leave home and be uncomfortable.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“Small repeated steps of obedience produce immunity to large steps of temptation.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“God’s great mercy and fierce wrath are both solid realities that stretch like railroad tracks to a point beyond our comprehension”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“We defeat the Devil by believing and obeying God.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“Sir Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747–1813) was a Scottish jurist and historian. It is thought that he wrote in 1801: “The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back to bondage.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“A vacuum in the human spirit longs for the intimacy of a loving Father.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“How frustrating it must be to be the Devil. Whatever he means for evil (Gen. 50:20), God has the ability to turn for good. Time after time they have blown out the victory cigars in hell at the realization that certain defeat has once again been grasped from the jaws of victory. “This just in: The cross is still bloody, but the blasted tomb is now empty!” God’s unmatched ability to turn the schemes of the Enemy into the good of the saints has made both the Devil and demons insecure. Poor devils, their only certainty is defeat. God’s faithfulness has robbed them of their parties.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“Our limitation is that we can only see the edges of God’s ways and His character. He is so much bigger, so much better, so much purer, so much deeper than we can fathom, and His ways are not our ways.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“DO NOT THINK ME MAD. IT IS NOT TO MAKE MONEY THAT I BELIEVE A CHRISTIAN SHOULD LIVE. THE NOBLEST THING A MAN CAN DO IS JUST HUMBLY TO RECEIVE AND THEN GO AMONGST OTHERS AND GIVE.” —David Livingstone”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“God does not care about disappointing our celebrations even when the party is for Him.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“The person who has no reputation to protect is the most free. What a luxury not to care what people think of us. “Praise and blame equally are nothing to him who is dead and buried with Christ,” Father Macarius said.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“Success in ministry is not the goal. God is the goal—and that is what God gave to Moses.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“Signs and wonders arrest our attention but they cannot transform our hearts. Only the shed blood of the incarnate Son of God has the power to change hearts and save souls.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“Those who resist us and attack us keep us dependent on God; they make us stronger. Oh, the blessedness of having enemies—they are the exercise weights of the soul, the resistance that builds our spiritual muscles. How thankful we should be to those who do not like us (even within the household of faith). How grateful we should be to those who attempt to assassinate us in character or body. They are friends to our soul.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“Jesus expects us to eat right, sleep well, and be consistent in physical exercise. His divine energy is not a magic pill that covers our stupidity or neglect. But even when we are disciplined in these practical areas of life,”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“The genius of the Devil is his ability to take wicked concepts and wrap them in partial truths.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“If you do not have joy in your suffering you are not suffering God’s way. You are just miserable.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“The true follower of Jesus willingly suffers violence but does not enjoy watching it.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“Social media reveals both too much and too little. On the one hand, every banality is self-disclosed to a voyeuristic world. On the other hand, our true selves are buried beneath layers of self-absorption. Psalm 139 unveils the joys of being fully known.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“A muted Christianity is a starving Christianity—and it will eventually die.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“If God mandated that Elisha cross over to eternal health on the bridge of terminal illness, how dare we presume that Christians will be spared the burdens of sickness, suffering, or trial?”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“Working in the Arab world teaches you to have a macro view of life. If you look at each day's labor with a microscope, the results drive you to despair. Arabic comes pitifully slowly, disciples are made with agony, colleagues falter, governments shake, and progress, if measurable at all, seems to be backward. Instead, you need to look at the larger view. Look back over the last years to consider what God has done, then look forward to all he has promised to do - now the picture is much brighter. All of us have lost battles, all of us bear scars. Failure does not surprise us or discourage us. We simply fall forward, dust ourselves off, and rise to battle on, for we known how this ends: God wins.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“The incarnation is God leaving the sanitary zone and climbing down to swim in the sewage, looking for people of infinite less worth than He. The incarnation is wonderfully horrible. It stuns and amazes us.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“We can get this shame into the light (1 John 1: 7). Bringing dark things into the light breaks the back of sin and brings us into fellowship not only with God but with one another.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“We can get this shame into the light (1 John 1:7). Bringing dark things into the light breaks the back of sin and brings us into fellowship not only with God but with one another.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“All those who help God, including those who help Him discipline others, should agonize with the offender and rejoice that God always remembers and returns with mercy.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“It is not in the nature of God to enjoy the misery of others—even when they deserve it. When the sinful suffer, our hearts must not harbor ease and apathy.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“Biblical balance requires radical responses to Jesus. This is the peace of heaven (v. 38).”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“God Tends to Select the Lowliest to Lead. The world selects leaders according to perceived competence. God selects His representatives by character. He delights to seek out the humblest and lowest and by their elevation to glorify Himself. A humble teenage girl said it best: “He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly” (Luke 1:51–52). We stand with Mary and magnify the Lord, rejoicing in God our Savior. He has done all things well, even setting up surprising people to lead us.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus

“We Get the Leaders We Deserve. This unheralded principle of leadership holds true for countries as well as for churches and mission teams. Followers tend to complain and compare their leadership to others. They fail to see that honest people elect or are granted honest leaders and vice versa. Leaders almost invariably represent the culture and context from which they emerge. When we are unhappy with those who lead us, we must first examine ourselves. Men and women of integrity are ultimately rewarded with faithful and capable leaders. One of God’s miracles is to reward good followers by shaping raw leaders into men and women who represent Him well to those they serve.”
― Dick Brogden, Live Dead Joy: 365 Days of Living and Dying with Jesus