Top 255 Quotes & Sayings by Ann Voskamp - Page 2

We're not giving what we're called to give, unless that giving affects how we live - affects what we put on our plate and where we make our home and hang our hat and what kind of threads we've got to have on our back. Surplus Giving is the leftover you can afford to give; Sacrificial Giving is the love gift that changes how you live - because the love of Christ has changed you. God doesn't want your leftovers. God wants your love overtures, your first-overs, because He is your first love.

Eucharisteo—thanksgiving—always precedes the miracle.

Every time I surrender to stress, aren’t I advertising the unreliability of God?

You were made for the place where your real #? passion meets #? compassion because there lies your real purpose.

Worry is belief gone wrong. Because you don't believe that God will get it right. But peace - peace is belief that exhales. Because you believe that God's provision is everywhere - like air.

Be radical about grace and relentless about truth and resolute about holiness.

Expose your life to real need. Visit a developing a country. Take a short term mission trip. Write an inmate, send a letter to a sponsored child, serve in the inner city, at a food bank, with a crisis pregnancy center. Make time for shut-ins, the elderly, the sick, the single-parents, the new believers. Just find one way you can make your awareness of your gift-graced life intersect with a real place of need - and Christ in us will do the rest.

You've got to use the life you've been given to give others life

When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us?

Thanksgiving creates abundance; and the miracle of multiplying happens when I give thanks-take the just one loaf, say it is enough, and give thanks-and He miraculously makes it more than enough.

Thanksgiving creates abundance.

God is always good and we are always loved... even when what He gives may appear ugly.

The prayers we weave into the matching of socks, the stirring of oatmeal, the reading of stories, they survive fire.

Joy is the realest reality, the fullest life, and joy is always given, never grasped. God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy.

Your naked body deserves the honor of being shared only with someone who is covenanted to never stop loving your naked soul.

The cynics, they can only speak of the dark, of the obvious, and this is not hard. For all it’s supposed sophistication, it’s cynicism that’s simplistic. In a fallen world, how profound is to see the cracks? The sages and prophets, the disciples and revolutionaries, they are the ones up on the ramparts, up on the wall pointing to the dawn of the new Kingdom coming, pointing to the light that breaks through all things broken, pointing to redemption always rising and to the Blazing God who never sleeps.

Where ever you are be all there

How long does it take your soul to realize that your life is full? The slower the living, the greater the sense of fullness and satisfaction.

Our fall is always first a failure to give thanks.

God’s not out to get you - He’s out to give to you.

Gratitude for the seemingly insignificant—a seed—this plants the giant miracle.

I receive grace. And through me, grace could flow on. Like a cycle of water in continuous movement, grace is meant to fall, a rain...again, again, again. I could share the grace, multiply the joy, extend the table of the feast, enlarge the paradise of His presence. I am blessed. I can bless.

Girls rival each other. Women revive each other. Girls empale each other. Women empower each other. Girls compare each other. Women champion each other.

Gratitude is at the center of a life of faith. It sounds to simple to be true, but isn't that the sign of all deep truth: so simple we're tempted to dismiss it, and so hard, it is exactly what God uses to change our hard lives.

God reveals Himself in rearview mirrors. And I've an inkling that there are times when we need to drive a long, long distance, before we can look back and see God's back in the rearview mirror. Maybe sometimes about as far as heaven -- that kind of distance.

You, who were made by Love, made for love-- be still and know and watch love come down.

You will be most remembered-by what brought you most joy.

Research actually indicates that if you write down what you're grateful for, it increases your happiness by 25 percent. And who doesn't want that? And God's word says (1 Thessalonians 5), "Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." Who doesn't want to know exactly what God's will is for them?

What if I gave thanks in the trouble, for the trouble, because the trouble is a gift that causes me to turn? What if I loved God not for His goods but for His love itself that is goodness enough?

The life that counts blessings discovers its yielding more than it seems.

The joy of the Lord is your strength and the person of Christ is your unassailable joy - and the battle for joy is nothing less than fighting the good fight of faith.

Thanksgiving-giving thanks in everything-prepares the way that God might show us His fullest salvation in Christ.

The whole of the life -- even the hard -- is made up of the minute parts, and if I miss the infinitesimals, I miss the whole. These are new language lessons, and I live them out. There is a way to live the big of giving thanks in all things. It is this: to give thanks in this one small thing. The moments will add up.

The true Love Dare. To move into His presence and listen to His love unending and know the grace uncontainable. This is the vault of the miracles. The only thing that can change us, the world, is this- all His love.

Grace is the only thing that is ever enough.

God is good and I am always loved.

I don't really want more time; I just want enough time. Time to breathe deep and time to see real and time to laugh long, time to give You glory and rest deep and sing joy and just enough time in a day not to feel hounded, pressed, driven, or wild to get it all done-yesterday.

I have to seek God beauty. Because isn't my internal circuitry wired to seek out something worthy of worship? . True Beauty worship, worship of Creator Beauty Himself. God is present in all moments, but I do not deify the wind in the pines, the snow falling on the hemlocks, the moon over harvested wheat. Pantheism, seeing the natural world as divine, is a very different thing than seeing divine God present in all things . Nature is not God but God revealing the weight of Himself, all His glory, through the looking glass of nature.

Life isn't an emergency. Christ is in charge of every moment of the day; nothing catches Him off guard.

We all get to choose where we set up the stage of our lives - before the Crowds, the Court, the Congregation, the Critics (inner or otherwise)-- or the Cross of Christ. All except One will assess your performance. Only One will accept you before your performance ... Only in Jesus is there 100% acceptance before even 1% performance.

Satan’s sin becomes the first sin of all humanity: the sin of ingratitude. Adam and Eve are, simply, painfully, ungrateful for what God gave. Isn’t that the catalyst of all my sins? Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other.

When we know Christ, we always know how things are going to go...always for our good and always for His glory.

Only speak words that make souls stronger.

All fear is but the notion that God's love ends.

Do I really smother my own joy because I believe that anger achieves more than love? That Satan's way is more powerful, more practical, more fulfilling in my daily life than Jesus' way? WHy else get angry? Isn't it because I think complaining, exasperation, resentment will pound me up into the full life I really want? When I choose-and it is a choice-to crush joy with bitterness, am I not purposefully choosing to take the way of the Prince of Darkness? Choosing the angry way of Lucifer because I think it is more effective-more expedient-than giving thanks?

No one told me that it would all happen at the same hallowed time: Mothering is at once the hardest and the holiest and the happiest.

I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment.

Every moment I live, I live bowed to something. And if I don't see God, I'll bow down before something else.

Life-changing gratitude does not fasten to a life unless nailed through with one very specific nail at a time.

Every day, with every word, we get to decide: Do we mar the world, or mark the world?

God reveals Himself in rearview mirrors.

Lament is a cry of belief in a good God, a God who has His ear to our hearts, a God who transfigures the ugly into beauty. Complaint is the bitter howl of unbelief in any benevolent God in this moment, a distrust in the love-beat of the Father's heart.

You love as well as you are willing to be inconvenienced.

Learning slowly to not be so reactionary while inserting verbal gratitude into stressful situations is almost like being healed of mental blindness.

We were made to live in a posture of grateful worship, and when we live in praise we live our purpose, and all the pieces fall in place, us all falling down in thanks.

Who would ever know the greater graces of comfort and perserverance, mercy and forgiveness, patience and courage, if no shadows fell over a life?

Can God be counted on? Count blessings and find out how many of His bridges have already held.

Every mountain that every Christian ever faces, the Lord levels with sufficient grace.

God only allows pain if He’s allowing something new to be born.

When we fixate on the worst in something, we render ourselves incapable of fixing anything... But attend to the good in something - and we act towards the best in everything.