Welcome to The Week In Words, where we share quotes from the last week’s reading. If something you read this past week  inspired you, caused you to laugh, cry, think, dream, or just resonated with you in some way, please share it with us, attributing it to its source, which can be a book, newspaper, blog, Facebook — anything that you read. More information is here.

Here are a few that stood out to me:

From the July/August 2001 issue of The Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter:

The Purpose of Trouble

“Whatever else trouble is in the world for, it is here for this good purpose: to develop strength. For trouble is a moral and spiritual task. It is something which is hard to do. And it is in the spiritual world as in the physical, strength is increased by encounter with the difficult. A world without any trouble in it would be, to people of our kind, a place of spiritual enervation and moral laziness. Fortunately, every day is crowded with care. Every day to every one of us brings its questions, its worries, and its tasks, brings its sufficiency of trouble. Thus we get our daily spiritual exercise. Every day we are blessed with new opportunities for the development of strength of soul.” ~ George Hodges

I think I saw this on a couple of people’s Facebook:

Christianity if false is of no importance & if true is of infinite importance but it can’t be moderately important ~ C. S. Lewis

If you’ve read anything that particularly spoke to you that you’d like to share, please either list it in the comments below or write a post on your blog and then put the link to that post (not your general blog link) in Mr. Linky below. I do ask that only family-friendly quotes be included.

I hope you’ll visit some of the other participants as well and glean some great thoughts to ponder. And don’t forget to leave a comment here, even if you don’t have any quotes to share! 🙂

Welcome to The Week In Words, where we share quotes from the last week’s reading. If something you read this past week  inspired you, caused you to laugh, cry, think, dream, or just resonated with you in some way, please share it with us, attributing it to its source, which can be a book, newspaper, blog, Facebook — anything that you read. More information is here.

Here are a few that stood out to me this week:

From a friend’s Facebook:

Doubt wonders, “Have I done enough to go to heaven?” Grace answers, “No, you haven’t. But Jesus has on your behalf.”

Seen at Janet‘s:

The gospel…is eternally “relevant” or it’s not good news at all. Our concern is not to “make it relevant,” but to be faithful to its message amidst the whirl of our time.

Seen at Chrysalis‘s Facebook:

If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies. ~Author Unknown

A needed reminder as most of us do not like change, or at least not much of it.

From an Elisabeth Elliot e-mail devotional, taken from the chapter “Nevertheless We Must Run Aground” from the book Love Has a Price Tag.

Heaven is not here, it’s There. If we were given all we wanted here, our hearts would settle for this world rather than the next. God is forever luring us up and away from this one, wooing us to Himself and His still invisible Kingdom, where we will certainly find what we so keenly long for.

From Warren Wiersbe’s With the Word commenting on Proverbs 23:23:

It costs something to live by the truth, but it costs even more to abandon the truth.

I’m hesitant to add one more, and a lengthy one at that, because I have so many already, but I just don’t feel I can leave it off. It made me sit and think for a good while, and even a few days later provided more food for thought. From the September 20 reading of The Invitation by Derick Bingham concerning Peter cutting off the high priest’s servant’s ear and Jesus healing it:

Interesting, isn’t it, that the last act of supernatural healing performed by the Saviour during His earthly ministry was necessary because of the blundering zeal of one of his followers? Don’t you think the Lord is still constantly healing the wounds made on people’s lives and souls by those who ought to know better? There is still plenty of zeal-without-knowledge in the Christian church and it does more harm than good. Of course, we admire Peter’s honest zeal but Malchus didn’t, did he? Be careful you don’t wound someone today by enthusiasm for the Lord that does not come from knowledge of Him.

There are two admonitions from this passage: to be careful of a zeal without knowledge that wounds rather than helping, and, if you have been the victim of such zeal, to go to Jesus for healing rather than forever nursing that wound or letting it fester into a bitter and vitriolic infection.

I hope you’ll visit some of the other participants as well and glean some great thoughts to ponder. And don’t forget to leave a comment here, even if you don’t have any quotes to share!

Welcome to The Week In Words, where we share quotes from the last week’s reading. If something you read this past week  inspired you, caused you to laugh, cry, think, dream, or just resonated with you in some way, please share it with us, attributing it to its source, which can be a book, newspaper, blog, Facebook — anything that you read. More information is here.

Here are a few that stood out to me this week:

Seen in Claudia Barba’s Monday Morning Club e-mail:

“Damage is easier to prevent than to repair.”

That is so applicable in so many areas!

Seen at girltalk:

“They that love God as they ought, will have such a sense of his wonderful long-suffering toward them under the many injuries they have offered to him, that it will seem to them but a small thing to bear with the injuries that have been offered to them by their fellow-men.” ~ Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits, p.78.

This concept, also seen in the parable of the servant who would not forgive a lesser debt after being forgiven a great debt, usually melts whatever resistance I have against forgiving someone. As long as I am focusing on what they did, my heart remains hard against them, but when I remember God has forgiven me so much more than I’ve done against Him, so much more than anyone else could ever do to me, I have no grounds to withhold forgiveness to anyone else.

Seen at Diane‘s Facebook:

“Prayer is the place where burdens change shoulders.”

From The Old Guys:

When you sailors see the haven before you, though you were mightily troubled before you could see any land, yet when you come near the shore and can see a certain land-mark, that contents you greatly. A godly man in the midst of the waves and storms that he meets with can see the glory of heaven before him and so contents himself. One drop of the sweetness of heaven is enough to take away all the sourness and bitterness of all the afflictions in the world. ~ Jeremiah Burroughs

“For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” II Corinthians 4:17-18.

Also, for those who might not have seen it and might be interested, I shared several good quotes from Beyond Suffering: Discovering the Message of Job by Laytin Talbert in my review of the book here.

If you’ve read anything that particularly spoke to you that you’d like to share, please either list it in the comments below or write a post on your blog and then put the link to that post (not your general blog link) in Mr. Linky below. I do ask that only family-friendly quotes be included.

I hope you’ll visit some of the other participants as well and glean some great thoughts to ponder. And don’t forget to leave a comment here, even if you don’t have any quotes to share!

Welcome to The Week In Words, where we share quotes from the last week’s reading. If something you read this past week  inspired you, caused you to laugh, cry, think, dream, or just resonated with you in some way, please share it with us, attributing it to its source, which can be a book, newspaper, blog, Facebook — anything that you read. More information is here.

From a friend’s Facebook:

“God’s solution is sometimes different. He does not always lift people out of the situation. He does not pluck them out of the darkness. He becomes the light in the darkness, the peace in the midst of the conflict….” Patricia St. John

Reminds me of a plaque I had some years ago that said something like, “Sometimes God stills the storm, and sometimes He stills His child in the midst of the storm.”

From Lisa‘s Twitter feed:

God’s self-exaltation is not because he’s incomplete without praise, but because we’re not complete without it. ~ John Piper

I mentioned some time back a professor bringing up a rhetorical question without really answering it and it causing me some problems for years. It was on this topic, and this quote helps immensely. I had come to that conclusion before, that God’s wanting our praise had more to do with our need of it than his desire for it, but I love the way Piper put it.

From another friend’s Facebook:

“Failure…the opportunity to start over again with more knowledge than you had before.”

One of the most valuable sermons I ever heard, one that has stuck with me for decades, was one in college having to do with failure. I wasn’t failing, but I was struggling more than I ever had and felt like I was failing, and of course have had many individual failures throughout life. It was such a blessing to know failure was not an end in itself.

And finally, from this blog which I discovered while searching for something else:

“We ought to give thanks for all fortune: If it is ‘good’ because it is good, if ‘bad’ because it works in us patience, humility and the contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.” ~ C.S. Lewis

If you’ve read anything that particularly spoke to you that you’d like to share, please either list it in the comments below or write a post on your blog and then put the link to that post (not your general blog link) in Mr. Linky below. I do ask that only family-friendly quotes be included.

I hope you’ll visit some of the other participants as well and glean some great thoughts to ponder. And don’t forget to leave a comment here, even if you don’t have any quotes to share! 🙂

Welcome to The Week In Words, where we share quotes from the last week’s reading. If something you read this past week  inspired you, caused you to laugh, cry, think, dream, or just resonated with you in some way, please share it with us, attributing it to its source, which can be a book, newspaper, blog, Facebook — anything that you read. More information is here.

I just started reading Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World edited by C. J. Mahaney this week, am only 50 pages in, and have over ten quotes marked already.

Here are two from the foreward by John Piper:

The gospel makes all the difference between whether you are merely conservative or whether you are conquering worldliness in the power of the Spirit for the glory of Christ.

What does it look like when the blood of Christ governs the television and the Internet and the iPod and the checkbook and the neckline?… The only way most folks know how to draw lines is with rulers. The idea that lines might come into being freely and lovingly (and firmly) as the fruit of the gospel is rare (p. 11).

The last part of that second one is golden: too often people try to handle worldliness with rules, working from and on the external, rather than cultivating a heart after God which will then establish the “lines.”

The second is from the second chapter by Craig Cabaniss:

Glorifying God is an intentional pursuit. We don’t accidentally drift into holiness: rather, we mature gradually and purposefully, one choice at a time (p. 40).

If we’re “drifting,” it’s probably going to be in the wrong direction.

If you’ve read anything that particularly spoke to you that you’d like to share, please either list it in the comments below or write a post on your blog and then put the link to that post (not your general blog link) in Mr. Linky below. I do ask that only family-friendly quotes be included.

I hope you’ll visit some of the other participants as well and glean some great thoughts to ponder. And don’t forget to leave a comment here, even if you don’t have any quotes to share!

Welcome to The Week In Words, where we share quotes from the last week’s reading. If something you read this past week  inspired you, caused you to laugh, cry, think, dream, or just resonated with you in some way, please share it with us, attributing it to its source, which can be a book, newspaper, blog, Facebook — anything that you read. More information is here.

Here are a few thought-provoking quotes that caught my eye this week:

From Robin Lee Hatcher‘s Facebook:

“Can an acorn become a rose, a whale fly like a bird, or lead become gold? Absolutely not. You cannot be anything you want to be. But you can be everything God wants you to be.” ~ Max Lucado

Is anyone else as tired as I am of sayings like “You can do or be anything you want” and “If you can think it, you can do it”? This was a wonderful answer to those philosophies.

And another from Robin:

“As we grow in Christ, we will learn how to appreciate peace over personal preferences. Remember, Christ is the Prince of Peace.” ~ Beth Moore

Though a little different, this reminded me of a quote from a forgotten source that it is not surrender to the Lord that causes us problems and anguish, it is the struggle against surrender. As long as we cling to our own preferences, our own way and will, we won’t have that peace of fully yielding to Christ. So why, then, do we keep doing it?!

See at Chrysalis:

“The arts are the John the Baptist of the heart, preparing the affections for Christ.” ~ Jacques Maritain

And finally, from another friend’s Facebook:

“Revivals should not be necessary. God intended that His people should grow in grace & holiness without periodic spells of backsliding & repenting. But so long as we have such a malarial brand of Christianity, a fever & a chill, a fever & a chill, we shall need revivals.” ~ Vance Havner

If you’ve read anything that particularly spoke to you that you’d like to share, please either list it in the comments below or write a post on your blog and then put the link to that post (not your general blog link) in Mr. Linky below. I do ask that only family-friendly quotes be included.

I hope you’ll visit some of the other participants as well and glean some great thoughts to ponder. And don’t forget to leave a comment here, even if you don’t have any quotes to share! 🙂

Welcome to The Week In Words, where we share quotes from the last week’s reading. If something you read this past week  inspired you, caused you to laugh, cry, think, dream, or just resonated with you in some way, please share it with us, attributing it to its source, which can be a book, newspaper, blog, Facebook — anything that you read. More information is here.

This was from Robin Lee Hatcher’s Facebook page:

“Fear of trials sometimes depletes more energy than facing trials!” Beth Moore

Isn’t that the truth?! I can waste so much time and energy on something that turns out not to be a problem after all.

And from John Piper’s Twitter feed:

After calming the sea [Jesus] said, “Why are you afraid?” Not because Christians never drown. But they are safe in drowning.

I’ve often thought that if ever there were a legitimate fear, being at sea in a storm was one, and yet Jesus questioned the disciples’ fear there. This gives insight as to why. Even if “the worst” happens — they would still be safe, as will we if we’re trusting in Jesus as Savior.

I shared this among my links on Saturday, but it was so good I wanted to mention it again in case anyone missed it. From the article We Need Boring Christians:

Many of us want to do something awesome, something epic. We tend to think that the more normal, the less ‘spiritual.’ So it is quite possible that our aspirations to be radical stem from dangerous ambitions to perform biography-worthy feats of global glory.

God does call some people some times to do something radical, something “epic,” but He also calls each of us to be faithful in everyday, “ordinary” life.

If you’ve read anything that particularly spoke to you that you’d like to share, please either list it in the comments below or write a post on your blog and then put the link to that post (not your general blog link) in Mr. Linky below. I do ask that only family-friendly quotes be included.

I hope you’ll visit some of the other participants as well and glean some great thoughts to ponder. And don’t forget to leave a comment here, even if you don’t have any quotes to share!