2005-03-17

Gehoorzaamheid

Most Christians are educated way beyond their level of obedience
John Maxwell

Wat spreekt dit elkaar heerlijk tegen

The Christian who is not committed to a group of other believers for praying, sharing, and serving, so that he is known, as he knows others, is not an obedient Christian. He is not in the will of God. However vocal he may be in his theology, he is not obeying the Lord.
Dr. Ray Ortland


A lot of people are leaving the church and going back to God.
Lenny Bruce

En wat vinden we dat fijn...

Most people joining our churches become exactly like the people in our churches.
Dannis Clark

Huis van levende stenen

Slowly, through all the universe the temple of God is being built. And whenever, in any place, a soul by freewilled obedience, catches the fire of God’s likeness, it is set into the growing walls, a living stone.
Phillips Brooks

Er steeds meer zijn voor jezelf...

The longer a church has been in existence, the more its resources go toward its own preservation rather than toward outreach and evangelism. Our tendency is to design ministries that meet our own needs as opposed to the needs of those who have not yet entered the kingdom.
Alan Nelson

Samen...

Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things, but just look at what they can do when they stick together.
Vesta Kelly - over de gemeente

Een kerk die evolueert (2)

Too many churches today are devoid of the Spirit of Pentecost because they are dry and stale, where people are in a stupor; where worship services are wooden and so scripted that they are hollow; where the preaching is dull and flat; where the singing is Geritol-tired and without the vim and vigor which speaks of a crucified, died and risen Lord; where if anyone taps his foot and says, 'Amen', he is stared into silence, and if anyone shouts, 'Thank you, Jesus' the people call the EMS or 911! Too many churches have become mausoleums for the dead rather than coliseums of praise for a living God. They have lost the spirit of Pentecost! They have lost their enthusiasm. They have lost their joy for Jesus and find themselves suffering from what William Willimon calls 'Institutional and Spiritual Dry Rot.' If the Church is to survive the next millennium it must recapture some of the praise and enthusiasm it had two millennia ago

Carlyle Fielding Ste, How Long Will You Limp?

We zijn het lichaam van Christus

Christ has no body now but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours

Yours are the eyes through which he looks
compassion on this world

Yours are the feet with which
He walks to do good

Yours are the hands with which
He blesses all the world

Yours are the hands
Yours are the feet
Yours are the eyes
You are His body

Prayer of ST. Theresa

Some clues for a living church

Some clues that a church is living, vital and active are: Live churches have many people who bring their Bibles and use them; dead churches do not. Live churches are filled with praise and sounds of joy and thanksgiving;dead churches are apathetic and lifeless.
Roy B. Zuck, The Speaker’s Quote Book - Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1997

xxx up

A church that has passion is a church where
- Discouraged folks cheer up, dishonest folks fees up
- sour folks sweeten up
- closed folk open up
- gossipers shut up
- conflicted folks make up
- sleeping folks wake up
- lukewarm folk fire up
- dry bones shake up
- and pew potatoes stand up!

But most of all, that Christ the Savior of the entire world is lifted up

Davon Huss

Uitdagingen voor de kerk

The biggest challenge for the church at the opening of the twenty-first century is to develop a solution to the discontinuity and fragmentation of the Western lifestyle.
The Connecting Church - Randy Frazee, p. 37

Not growth but health

Rick Warren states, and I agree, that the key issue for churches in the 21st Century will be church health, not growth.
Because when a congregation is healthy it will grow. God wants his church to grow, and to the extent that we are healthy, to that extent we will grow naturally.
Colossians 2:19
We can grow up healthy in God only as he nourishes us.

Don Hawks

Saints out of sinners

God creates out of nothing. Wonderful, you say.
Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful:
He makes saints out of sinners.

Soren Kierkegaard

Signs of live

These are the signs,
these are the signs of life,
The love that proves there is a living faith inside...

Steven Curtis Chapman

The whole purpose of out lives...

The whole purpose for which we exist is to be taken into the life of God.
C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity

Not what we preach..

It is not what men eat, but what they digest that makes them strong
Not what we gain, but what we save that makes us rich
Not what we read, but what we remember that makes us learned
Not what we preach or pray, but what we practice and believe that makes us Christians –

Francis Bacon

Christelijk geloof <> christelijk gedrag

There is no greater foe to Christianity than mere profession.
There is no greater discredit to Christianity today than to stand up for it, and yet not live it in our lives.
There is no greater danger in the Christian world today than to stand up for the Bible, and yet to deny that Bible by the very way we defend it.
There is no greater hindrance to Christianity today than to contend for orthodoxy, whatever the orthodoxy may be, and to deny it by the censoriousness, the hardness, the unattractiveness with which we champion our cause.

Oh, this power of pérsonal testimony:
"with the heart filled with the love of Christ, the mind saturated with the teaching of Christ, the conscience sensitive to the law of Christ, the whole nature aglow with grace and love of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Uit: Listening to the Giants, 149-50, Warren Wiersbe, Baker 1980; over W.H. Griffith Thomas