Top 328 Quotes & Sayings by Francis Chan - Page 4

The greatest good on this earth is God

He measures our lives by how we love.

I don't want Him to return and find me sitting in a theater.

Lukewarm people do not live by faith; their lives are structured so that they don't have to.

God didn’t just give a little for us; He gave His best. He gave Himself.

Jesus didn't say that if you wanted to follow Him you could do it in a lukewarm manner. He said, 'Take up your cross and follow Me.'

If life were stable, I'd never need God's help.

Hell is the backdrop that reveals the profound and unbelievable grace of the cross. It brings to light the enormity of our sin and therefore portrays the undeserved favor of God in full color.

We are a culture that relies on technology over community, a society in which spoken and written words are cheap, easy to come by, and excessive. Our culture says anything goes; fear of God is almost unheard of. We are slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry.

Some of you are sitting at home saying, 'I don't need a church to love God,' and I am here telling you that you are so wrong.

...we are quick to rationalize our entertainment and priorities yet are slow to commit to serving God.

God has not had an identity crisis. He knows that he is Great and deserves to be the center of our lives.

Giving that is not motivated by love is worth nothing.

People who are obsessed are raw with God; they do not attempt to mask the ugliness of their sins or their failures. Obsessed people don't put it on for God; He is their safe place, where they can be at peace.

What are you doing right now that requires faith?

[at CMC West Coast 2011, on 1 Samuel 14] If just a few of you would step up and be like Jonathan ... as you step out in faith, you know what's going to happen? There'll be people like Saul who'll say, "God's doing something through that guy, God's doing something through that girl. I want to be a part of that.

We have to believe it enough that it changes how we live.

Doesn't every encounter with God only cause us to thirst for Him more?

The church becomes irrelevant when it becomes purely a human creation. We are not all we were made to be when everything in our lives and churches can be explained apart from the work and presence of the Spirit of God.

Salvation is all about the grace of God. There is absolutely nothing that you can do to save yourself or earn God's favor.

When the church really takes on the humble characteristics of Christ, that's going to lead to revival.

Sometimes we shrink from leadership because our pride makes us afraid of failure. That's not humility.

Just as you did not come to Christ on your own, neither will you remain in Christ on your own.

As I see it, a lukewarm Christian is an oxymoron; there is no such thing. To put it plainly, churchgoers who are 'lukewarm' are not Christians. We will not see them in heaven.

Obsessed people are more concerned with obeying God than doing what is expected or fulfilling the status quo. A person who is obsessed with Jesus will do things that don't always make sense in terms of success or wealth on this earth.

In reality, not one of us will ever be worthy. It is useless to attempt earning it; you'll never feel ready. It is unknown and uncomfortable. But there really is a God who forgives everything and loves endlessly.

If I were Satan and my ultimate goal was to thwart God's kingdom and purposes, one of my main strategies would be to get churchgoers to ignore the Holy Spirit.

It hit me that the students were talking about me, not God. I was standing before a holy God and robbing Him of the glory that was rightfully His.

He does not have to know us so well, but He chooses to.

Lukewarm people feel secure because they attend church, made a profession of faith at age twelve, were baptized, come from a Christian family, vote Republican, or live in America. Just as the prophets in the Old Testament warned Israel that they were not safe just because they lived in the land of Israel, so we are not safe just because we wear the label 'Christian' or because some people persist in calling us a 'Christian nation.

We are each given different gifts and talents by our Master. The thing that matters most is how we use what we have been given, not how much we make or do compared to someone else. What matters is that we spend ourselves.

As a culture, were so worried about whats going to happen to us 30 years from now that we are not taking care of our brothers and sisters who need help today.

When I read the statements of Christ, there seems to be this urgency and intensity. I guess that's what I get out of it when I read the tone of the Scriptures, which is very different from the tone of our culture.

God specifically created us to be like Him. This is impossible to wrap our minds around, but God created us like Him in some respect and then set us in the midst of this world to represent Him!

Luke warm people are continually concerned with playing it safe; they are slaves to the god of control. This focus on safe living keeps them from sacrificing and risking for God.

God exists outside of time, and since we are within time, there is no way we will ever totally grasp that concept.

We are not alone. Even now there are thousands of beings in heaven watching what is going on down here—a ‘great cloud of witnesses,’ the Scripture says. It reminds me that there is so much more to our existence than what we can see. What we do reverberates through the heavens and into eternity.

Nothing compares to being truly, exuberantly wanted by your children.

There is nothing better than giving up everything and stepping into a passionate love relationship with God, the God of the universe who made galaxies, leaves, laughter, and me and you.

I sometimes struggle with how to properly respond to God’s magnitude in a world bent on ignoring or merely tolerating Him. But know this: God will not be tolerated. He instructs us to worship and fear Him.

...no worship is better than apathetic worship.

People accuse me of going overboard preparing for my first ten million years in eternity; in my opinion, people go overboard in worrying about their last ten on earth.

Because when you’re wildly in love with someone, it changes everything.

The idea of holding back certainly didn't come from Scripture.

I don't want to lose the awe we get to help another human being.

God my Creator said, 'Go and make disciples.' So I don't want to sit and make excuses.

Pray with reverence, not half-heartedness.

A person who is obsessed with Jesus is more concerned with his or her character than comfort. Obsessed people know that true joy doesn't depend on circumstances or environment; it is a gift that must be chosen and cultivated, a gift that ultimately comes from God (James 1:2-4).

Most of us use ‘I’m waiting for God to reveal His calling on my life’ as a means of avoiding action. Did you hear God calling you to sit in front of the television yesterday? Or to go on your last vacation? Or exercise this morning? Probably not, but you still did it. The point isn’t that vacations or exercise are wrong, but that we are quick to rationalize our entertainment and priorities yet are slow to commit to serving God.

God wants to change us so much that it intrigues others.

The fact is, Scripture is filled with divine actions that don't fit our human standards of logic or morality. But they don't need to, because we are the clay and He is the Potter. We need to stop trying to domesticate God or confine Him to tidy categories and compartments that reflect our human sentiments rather than His inexplicable ways.

Don’t believe something just because you want to, and don’t embrace an idea just because you’ve always believed it. Believe what is biblical. Test all your assumptions against the precious words God gave us in the Bible.

Many Spirit-filled authors have exhausted the thesaurus in order to describe God with the glory He deserves. His perfect holiness, by definition, assures us that our words can't contain Him. Isn't it a comfort to worship a God we cannot exaggerate?

My only prayer for my time with you is, "God I just want these men and women to long for you."

Joy is something that we have to choose and then work for.

People who are obsessed with Jesus give freely and openly without censure. Obsessed people love those who hate them and who can never love them back.

It is easy to use the phrase 'God's will for my life' as an excuse for inaction or even disobedience. ... My hope is that instead of searching for 'God's will for my life' each of us would learn to seek hard after 'the Spirit's leading in my life today.' May we learn to pray for an open and willing heart, to surrender to the Spirit's leading with that friend, child, spouse, circumstance, or decision in our lives right now.

Yes, it is God who works in you. And, yes, there is work for you to do. Yes, the Spirit empowers you to do the work. And, yes, you do the work.

It's incredibly arrogant to pick and choose which incomprehensible truths we embrace. No one wants to ditch God's plan of redemption [the cross], even though it doesn't make sense to us. Neither should we erase God's revealed plan of punishment because it doesn't sit well with us. As soon as we do this, we are putting God's actions in submission to our own reasoning, which is a ridiculous thing for clay to do.

If God is truly the greatest good on this earth, would He be loving us if He didn’t draw us toward what is best for us (even if that happens to be Himself)? Doesn’t His courting, luring, pushing, calling and even ‘threatening’ demonstrate His love? If He didn’t do all of that, wouldn’t we accuse Him of being unloving in the end, when all things are revealed?