Discipleship Quotes

I am learning that man can live profoundly without masses of things.

~ Richard Byrd

Spiritual disciplines answer the shallow world.

~ Richard J. Foster

Managing relationships (with start ups) is more like teaching.

~ Jeff Jarvis

The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He must direct himself toward performance and contribution

~ Matt Perman

She chose to look at her surroundings where they think missionary mind-set.

~ Jeremy Camp

My focus was on trying to figure out what God wanted be to do next. Their (his parents') focus was on what I was doing for God at the moment.

~ Jeremy Camp

Worship may produce an outward change, but our inner condition will eventually be revealed

~ Richard J. Foster

Reagan understood an important distinction that (Lyndon) Johnson never grasped: being in control and being successful aren't always the same thing.

~ Jonathan Darman

The altar must be built in one place so that the fire may come down in another place.

~ Charles Williams

I wanted to explain so much to him at that moment, but you can't give a six-year-old the perspective of a 40-year-old, not really, so I gave him the short course.

~ David Skinner

I'm perfectly willing to be perfectly human.

~ Donald Miller

What am I doing? Tearing myself. My usual occupation at most times.

~ Charles Dickens

I thought parenting was going to reveal my strengths, never realizing that God had ordained it to reveal my weaknesses.

~ Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

As soon as (Teddy Roosevelt) received an assignment for a paper or project, he would set to work, never leaving anything to the last minute. Prepared so far ahead freed his mind from worry and facilitated fresh, lucid thought.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

All relationships are teleological, are going somewhere.

~ Donald Miller

I have traveled millions of miles, speaking to Christians. I have counseled privately with hundreds of them about their beliefs and lifestyles. What I have found has to be one of the most tragic ironies of all time: A tiny group of believers who have the Gospel keep mumbling it over and over to themselves. Meanwhile, millions who have never heard it once fall into the flames of eternal hell without ever hearing the salvation story.

~ K.p. Yohannan

When I push the button on my laptop, it should start up. If it doesn’t, it can’t blame its nonexistent emotions. It should respond immediately and appropriately because that’s what it has been created to do.In evaluating my parenting, I realized much of my anger with my children arose from my having the wrong perspective about them. I was viewing them as if they were machines.

~ Aaron Earls

Of Teddy Roosevelt and his siblings, the author writes they were, armed with an innate curiosity and discipline fostered by his remarkable father.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

There is an inverse relationship between control and trust. Trust is more of a two-way exchange than most people, especially those in power, realize. Leaders in government, news media, universities, and corporations think they can own trust, when, of course, trust is given to them. Trust is earned with difficulty and lost with ease. When those institutions treat constituents like masses of fools, children, miscreants,or prisoners, when they simply don't listen,it's unlikely they will engender warm feelings of mutual respect. Trust is an act of opening up. It's a mutual relationship of transparency and sharing. The more ways you find to reveal yourself and listen to others, the more you will build trust, which is your brand.

~ Jeff Jarvis

Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encourage pursuit of special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urge them to recite poetry.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

Freedom from anxiety is characterized by three inner attitudes. If what we have we received as a gift, and if what we have is to be cared for by God, and if what we have is available to others, then we will possess freedom from anxiety.

~ Richard J. Foster

For a long time, I thought I was good at relationships because I was charming.

~ Donald Miller

Lyndon Johnson knew how to make the most of such enthusiasm and how to play on it and intensify it. He wanted his audience to become involved. He wanted their hands up in the air. And having been a schoolteacher he knew how to get their hands up. He began, in his speeches, to ask questions.

~ Robert A. Caro

People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are governed by the thymotic urge, the quest for recognition. They seek the sort of glory that can be won only by showing strength in confrontation with death.

~ David Brooks

The generation of American men who fought the Second World War were too struck by the scale of the effort – and the stakes of the effort – to see the war as a stage for their own personal heroism. Most men seem to have taken the lesson that there's enough honor in doing a hard job when you have to.

~ Jeremy Rabkin

The web of trust is built at eye level, peer to peer.

~ Jeff Jarvis

You can't teach a person to love something. But you can get him to feel the heat of your love for something.

~ James Macdonald

There is nothing I like better than conversing with aged men. For I regard them as travelers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire whether the way is smooth and easy or rugged and difficult. Is life harder toward the end, or what report do you give it?

~ Plato

At the end of life, each of us must answer the question, Whose story captured my soul?

~ James Macdonald

If all you are doing is spending time with the struggling members of your church and you are not building proactively into your church's culture, and you are being shortsighted and limiting the effectiveness of your ministry.

~ James Macdonald

In healthy churches, the pastors life, not just his words, sets the tone for the church.

~ James Macdonald

We must evaluate every person, place, product, perspective, position, or pleasure we have looked to in place of the promises of God, and turn away from those things accordingly.

~ James Macdonald

Any counseling that does not pursue spiritual formation through an intimate relationship with Jesus by faith as one of its chief goals is not worthy to be called BIBLICAL counseling.

~ James Macdonald

The overemphasis on standardized tests forces teachers to teach the same restricted, unintuitive curriculum. Longtime educator Brent Evans has said that today's schools are organized as assembly lines, (running at a set speed) and with each worker (teacher) at designated places (way levels) on the assembly line performing predetermined actions on products (students) considered to be somewhat generic (one-size-fits-all) and passive (waiting to be filled or formed to the desired shape).

~ Brent Evans

When it comes to biblical counseling, friendship is central to the counseling relationship because it is a key aspect of the Gospel. Paul's words display it; Jesus' actions approve it. In Jesus Christ, friendship has its ultimate – that is, it's paradigmatic – display. He sacrificially gave Himself for the good of those he befriended – people who were awkward and troubled types, people who did not offer Him anything particularly desirable in return.

~ James Macdonald

So often, it's others around us who can see where God wants to grow us even before we see it ourselves.

~ James Macdonald

Small groups are the place to push past Bible knowledge and on to life application so that we can see people's lives transform more and more into the image of Christ.

~ James Macdonald

If our counseling is truly Christ-centered, then the topic of forgiveness will inevitably come up in the journey toward growth and change.

~ James Macdonald

The free man does what he likes in his working time and in his spare time what is required of him. The slave does what he is obliged to do in his working time and what he likes only when he is not at work.

~ Eric Gill

Edmondson has incisively discussed the ways college campuses have grown akin to upscale retirement homes for the very young, where the promise of intellectually demanding courses ranks far below the lure of new gymnastic facilities.

~ Maureen Corrigan