You can plant a church and grow a church. That's not that hard to do, but it's harder to be a viable source of transformation in a city or your time or space.
The greater the conceptual significance of a literary product, the more it should be assumed that it is based on an idea that determines the whole, and that the deeper consciousness of the time to which it belongs is reflected in it.
One of my biggest fears - maybe my biggest weakness as a Christian - is that I have a hard time going up to a stranger and talking to them about Jesus.
Spiritual formation is for everyone. Just as there is an 'outer you' that is being formed and shaped all the time, like it or not, by accident or on purpose, so there is an 'inner you.' You have a spirit.
We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself.
We can learn from him that suffering and the gift of himself is an essential gift we need in our time.
What encouragement the apostle holds out to us. O my friends, that we might leave all our pretensions, and come to the truth in our own hearts.
People learn to shop for churches; there is no loyalty to the church. They're consumers being attracted to one product or another. I think it's sacrilege, to tell you the truth, it really is.
But he is unworthy the name of a minister of the gospel of peace, who is unwilling, not only to have his name cast out as evil, but also to die for the truths of the Lord Jesus.
Therefore we examine with considerable diligence the consensus of the true, learned, and purer antiquity, and we love and praise the testimonies of the fathers which agree with the Scripture.
Agape, the love of each one of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes.
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
The words contained in it were inspired by the Holy Spirit into the minds of faithful men, called Prophets and Seers in the Old Testament; and Evangelists and Apostles in the New.
Because men believe not in Providence, therefore they do so greedily scrape and hoard. They do not believe in any reward for charity, therefore they will part with nothing.
But what is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive?
I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.
I am called here to answer before you, but I hear no things laid to my charge.
Neither do I think that I ever put any dishonour upon you.
If you look upon the rule in Titus it is a rule to me. If you convince me that it is no rule I shall yield.
I do here speak it before the court. I look that the Lord should deliver me by his providence.
As I understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makres plain the pathway.
