David Speakman

“The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God in the Dock.” 

C.S. Lewis

“The person who knows that she is justified is a person of unbounded confidence and assurance.  She knows that none of her failures can ever change the divine verdict.  It is guaranteed and settled in heaven forever.” 

Sinclair Ferguson

“And the Rock was Christ.” 

Paul to the Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 10:4

“Surrender don’t come natural to me.
I’d rather fight You for something I don’t really want
Than to take what You give that I need.
And I’ve beat my head against so many walls.
Now I’m falling down, I’m falling on my knees” 

Rich Mullins

“Jesus, do you see that wheelchair? You were right when you said that in this world we would have trouble, because that thing was a lot of trouble. But the weaker I was in that thing, the harder I leaned on you. And the harder I leaned on you, the stronger I discovered you to be. It never would have happened had you not given me the bruising of the blessing of that wheelchair.” 

Joni Eareckson Tada

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.” 

C.S. Lewis

“To Christ the Lord let every tongue
Its noblest tribute bring.
When He’s the subject of the song,
Who can refuse to sing?
Survey the beauties of His face
And on His glories dwell.
Think of the wonder of His grace
And all His triumphs tell.

Since from His bounty I receive
Such proofs of love divine,
Had I a thousand hearts to give
Lord, they should all be Thine!
A thousand men could not compose
A worthy song to bring,
Yet Your love is a melody
Our hearts can’t help but sing!” 

Samuel Stennett

“Words and music did for me what solid, even rigorous religious argument could never do—they introduced me to God, not belief in God, more an experiential sense of God.” 

Bono

“You can survive on your own.  You can grow strong on your own.  You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own.  Surely that is why, in Jesus’ sad joke, the rich man has as hard a time getting into Paradise as that camel through the needle’s eye because with his credit card in his pocket, the rich man is so effective at getting for himself everything he needs that he does not see that what he needs more than anything else in the world can be had only as a gift.  He does not see that the one thing a clenched fist cannot do is accept, even from [God] himself, a helping hand.” 

Frederick Buechner

“Great is the rest and gladness of sitting down at our Redeemer’s feet, the door shut and the key turned upon our self-applause.” 

Henry Moule

“Trust is the only way we can survive in the wilderness.” 

Chuck DeGroat

“Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.” 

Corrie Ten Boom

“For no matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ. And so through him the ‘Amen’ is spoken by us to the glory of God.” 

2 Corinthians 1:20

“By April 1970 I had grown sick to death of the church viewed as ‘religious cushion’ and me as chief cushioner. I had been a pastor for more than a decade and instructor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia for four years. I had given it all my best shot. But as a change agent I had bombed out. I was awash with cynicism about the prospects of the Christian church and went around with continual sorrow in my heart over the state of the churches around me. In a mood of dark despair I resigned both from the seminary faculty and from my pastorate . . . I began an intensive study of the promises of God in Scripture. I spent long hours tracing out great themes of grace predicted in Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Joel, Habakkuk, and Zechariah. Sometimes, like a man dying of thirst, I drank in the Gospel of John and the enormous promises presented in it . . . As the weeks passed, my mind also began to be captured by the vastness of God’s promises. I was awed by what the risen Lord had promised to me in my weakness, utterly silenced in my soul like an astronomer unexpectedly seeing a whole new galaxy when he was only searching for a single planet! . . . The promises are the handles we grab in our weakness in order to secure His Presence.” 

Jack Miller, Outgrowing the Ingrown Church

“There is more in God’s promises to comfort than in this world to perplex.” 

Thomas Watson

“Oh! I love God’s ‘shalls’ and ‘wills.’ There is nothing comparable to them. Let a man say ‘shall,’ what is it good for? ‘I will,’ says man, and he never performs; ‘I shall,’ says he, and he breaks his promise. But it is never so with God’s ‘shalls.’ If He says ‘shall,’ it shall be; when He says ‘will,’ it will be.” 

Charles Spurgeon

“The secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt he is.” 

Ann Voskamp

“A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench . . . they have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” 

Isaiah 42:3 and Jeremiah 8:11

“Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and our ourselves . . . it is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.” 

John Calvin

“The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: life is a story about me.”

Donald Miller

“God does not call the qualified. He qualifies the called.” 

handwritten sign over Lafayette Beck’s desk

“All things on Earth only exist in different stages of becoming garbage.” 

Jerry Seinfeld

“God does not make junk, and we dishonor the Creator if we take a negative view of the work of his hands when he himself takes such a positive view. In fact, so positive a view did he take of what he had created that he refused to scrap it when mankind spoiled it, but determined instead, at the cost of his Son’s life, to make it new and good again. God does not make junk, and he does not junk what he has made” 

Al Wolters, Creation Regained

“The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it . . . The pastor’s question is, ‘Who are these people, and how can I be with them in such a way that they can become what God is making them?’” 

Eugene Peterson

“In friendship … we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting–any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say to every group of Christian friends, ‘Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.’ The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.” 

C.S. Lewis

“What matters supremely therefore is not in the last analysis the fact that I know God, but the larger fact that underlies it—the fact that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me. I know him because he first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off of me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment therefore when his care falters.” 

J.I. Packer

“Jacob, Jacob, . . . I am God, the God of your father. Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for there I will make you into a great nation. I myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also bring you up again, and Joseph’s hand shall close your eyes.” 

Genesis 46:2-4