So here is what it comes down to: the ultimate choice in life is between pleasing ourselves and pleasing God.
If you give, it will be given to you. And I have found that generous people are blessed people.
Know this: God’s delays are not necessarily His denials. So keep praying.
I have found that if you invest in the lives of people, well-feed sheep will reproduce themselves.
Suffering is a part of every life. Rain falls upon every life. All people encounter tragedy. Everybody struggles through hardship – not just Christians. But for the believer, for the child of God, whatever comes into our life first comes through the grid of God’s plan and purpose for our lives. There are no accidents in the life of the believer.
Prayer is the idea of wishing for something from the depth of our hearts and bringing that desire forward to the throne of God.
Billy Graham once said, “We are the Bibles the world is reading. We are the creeds the world is needing. We are the sermons the world is heeding.
To get right with God, we need to utter three difficult words: “I have sinned.” God cannot forgive the sin we will not confess!
Far too often, unbelievers know Christians only for what we stand against, not what we stand for.
Remorse is feeling sorry, while repentance is being sorry enough to stop.
Unbelievers are not the enemy – they are people for whom Christ died. We need to remember we were each one of them once.
24For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees? 25But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance.
Often we fear the most difficult experiences of life only to discover that these are the experiences that bring Jesus Christ closer to us.
This is what every follower of Jesus should be engaged in on a regular basis: sharing our faith, leading others to Christ, discipling them, and helping them to get grounded in the church – and then going out and doing it all again.
Like the prodigal’s father, God accepts us as we are. But He doesn’t want to leave us that way. God will change us.
A poll by researcher George Barna revealed that about 25 percent of the adults in the United States would go to church if a friend would just invite them. Barna.
The full concept of discipleship includes sharing our faith, leading people to Christ, and helping them to mature in their faith. But somewhere along the line, the church has separated evangelism from discipleship.
I’ve always maintained that only when you get to the end of yourself do you get to the beginning of God.
One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility.
God can use anyone who truly decides he or she is “for Jesus,” as Greg did in 1970, to accomplish extraordinary things for His kingdom.
Today, 75 percent of young people who grew up in Christian homes and churches are now abandoning their faith as young adults. More than one-third of millennials say they are unaffiliated with any faith, up 10 percentage points since 2007.