discipleship

Many pastors have been reduced to secular "mentors" and "coaches" in exchange for authentic disciplers of men.

Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level.

let anyone using those weasel words __reedom of worship_ know, they have __reedom of worship_ in China and it is meaningless and it is vile. __reedom of worship_ says you may do what you like in that building on Sunday mornings or whenever you like, but when you come out you will bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state. That is the antithesis of what the Founders meant in guaranteeing __reedom of religion.

The man who goes to the top is the man who has something to say and says it when circumstances warrant. Men who keep silent underdressed are moral cowards.

Religious leaders who continue mechanically to expound the Scriptures without regard to the current religious situation are no better than the scribes and lawyers of Jesus_ day who faithfully parroted the Law without the remotest notion of what was going on around them spiritually,_ wrote Tozer. __hey fed the same diet to all and seemed wholly unaware that there was such a thing as meat in due season.

The desire we so often hear expressed today for __piscopal figures,_ __riestly men,_ __uthoritative personalities_ springs frequently enough from a spiritually sick need for the admiration of men, for the establishment of visible human authority, because the genuine authority of service appears to be so unimpressive.

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is the great venture. It can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to mistrust, and this mistrusts in turn brings forth war.

If you are going to walk with Jesus Christ, you are going to be opposed.... In our days, to be a true Christian is really to become a scandal.

Any religious person who says he does not really need human friends because God is his Friend is calling God a liar because He's the One Who says we also need human friends.

we all want to be called servants until someone treats us like one.

2 Timothy 3:16 says the speaker, instructs us, to draw from the Word of God for doctrine _ what is right. He instructs us to draw from the Bible for reproof _ pointing out what is wrong _ as well as correction that will tell people how to get right. Last, the Word also gives us instruction in how to stay right.

So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus.

We think in terms of apostolic journeys. God dares to put His greatest ambassadors in chains.

We use the word cross in our hymns, in our piety, in our prayers, and in our pastoral language. But we use it too cheaply. We say that a person has to live with some sort of suffering in life: a sickness that cannot be cured, an unresolvable personality conflict within the family, poverty, or some other unexplainable or unchangeable suffering. Then we say, __hat person has a cross to bear._ Granted, whatever kind of suffering we have is suffering that we can bear in confidence that God is with us. But the cross that Jesus had to face, because he chose to face it, was not__ike sickness__omething that strikes you without explanation. It was not some continuing difficulty in his social life. It was not an accident or catastrophe that just happened to hit him when it could have hit somebody else. Jesus_ cross was the price to pay for being the kind of person he was in the kind of world he was in; the cross that he chose was the price of his representing a new way of life in a world that did not want a new way of life. That is what he called his followers to do.

you don__ have to live in community long to realize that lives which are blessed and instructive are still flawed. The grace of the gospel isn__ only that the Word was made flesh in Jesus, but also that the eternal Word is made present in weak and wonderful people.

[God says] Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend - it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension, and I will help you to comprehend even as I do. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. My comprehension transcends yours.

Jesus, Willard says, __oes not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him.

My understanding from the Word of God is that I am supposed to preach for the maturation of the believer with a view that lost people are there.