Top 155 Quotes & Sayings by Randy Alcorn - Page 2

God comes right out and tells us why he gives us more money than we need. It's not so we can find more ways to spend it. It's not so we can indulge ourselves and spoil our children. It's not so we can insulate ourselves from needing God's provision. It's so we can give and give generously (2 Corinthians 8:14; 9:11)

Ironically, many people can't afford to give precisely because they're not giving. If we pay our debt to God first, then we will incur His blessing to help us pay our debts to men. But when we rob God to pay men, we rob ourselves of God's blessing.

Seeking happiness apart from a right relationship God is like trying to turn on a light that's unplugged.

Your children should love the Lord, work hard, and experience the joy of trusting God. More important than leaving your children an inheritance is leaving them a spiritual heritage. If you left your children money they didn't need, and if they were thinking correctly, wouldn't they give it to God anyway? Then why not give it to God yourself, since He entrusted it to you?

Whenever we have excess, giving should be our natural response. It should be the automatic decision, the obvious thing to do in light of Scripture and human need.

In Illinois a pregnant woman who takes an illegal drug can be prosecuted for 'delivering a controlled substance to a minor.' This is an explicit recognition that the unborn is a person with rights of her own. But that same woman who is prosecuted and jailed for endangering her child is perfectly free to abort her child. In America today, it is illegal to harm your preborn child, but it is perfectly legal to kill him.

There's only one requirement for enjoying God's grace: being broke . . . and knowing it.

Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our lives. Our powers of rationalization are unlimited. They allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, starve and go to hell.

Hell is not evil; it's a place where evil gets punished. Hell is not pleasant, appealing, or encouraging. But Hell is morally good, because a good God must punish evil.

Grace and truth are spiritual DNA, the building blocks of Christ-centered living.

Many [Western Christians] habitually think and act as if there is no eternity. . . . We major in the momentary and minor in the momentous.

Are we truly obeying the command to love our neighbor as ourselves if we're storing up money for potential future needs when our neighbor is laboring today under actual present needs?

Stewardship isn't a subcategory of the Christian life. Stewardship is the Christian life. After all, what is stewardship except that God has entrusted to us life, time, talents, money, possessions, family, and his grace? In each case, he evaluates how we regard what he has entrusted to us and what we do with it.

Messin with me, is like wearing cheese underwear down rat alley. Ollie Chandler in Deception

Why ask for your daily bread when you own the bakery?

When our eyes are set on eternity, the news that someone has come to know the Savior means a great deal more than the news of a salary raise or the prospect of getting the latest high-tech gadget.

Christ offers us the incredible opportunity to trade temporary goods and currency for eternal rewards.

If we can keep ourselves from interfering with the natural laws of life, mistakes can be our child's finest teachers.

I detest legalism. I certainly don't want to try to pour new wine into old wineskins, imposing superseded First Covenant restrictions on Christians. But at the same time, every New Testament example of giving goes far beyond the tithe. However, none falls short of it.

Real gold fears no fire.

But isn't it wrong to be motivated by reward? No, it isn't. If it were wrong, Christ wouldn't offer it to us a motivation.

Every kingdom work, whether publicly performed or privately endeavored, partakes of the kingdom's imperishable character. Every honest intention, every stumbling word of witness, every resistance of temptation, every motion of repentance, every gesture of concern, every routine engagement, every motion of worship, every struggle towards obedience, every mumbled prayer, everything, literally, which flows out of our faith-relationship with the Ever-Living One, will find its place in the ever-living heavenly order which will dawn at his coming.

This is one of the great paradoxes of suffering. Those who don't suffer much think suffering should keep people from God, while many who suffer a great deal turn to God, not from him.

God gives us abundant material blessing so that we can give it away, and give it generously.

We are all theologians, either good ones or bad ones. I'd rather be a good one. Wouldn't you?

Abundance isn't God's provision for me to live in luxury. It's his provision for me to help others live. God entrusts me with his money not to build my kingdom on earth, but to build his kingdom in heaven.

Give deliberately. Giving is at its best when it's a conscious effort that's repeatedly made.

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.

By trusting Christ's redemptive work for us, we can enter into what we long for: the happiness found only in God.

As long as I hold tightly to something, I believe I own it. But when I give it away, I relinquish control, power, and prestige. When I realize that God has a claim not merely on the few dollars I might choose to throw in an offering plate, not simply on 10 percent or even 50 percent, but on 100 percent of "my" money, it's revolutionary. If I'm God's money manager, I'm not God. Money isn't God. God is God. So God, money, and I are each put in our rightful place.

My purpose as a writer is to communicate in such a way as to challenge the thinking of readers and touch their hearts.

Unless we learn how to humbly tell each other our giving stories, our churches will not learn to give.

Give generously. How much is generous? There's no one-size-fits-all answer. If you've never tithed, start there - then begin to stretch your generosity.

Selfishness is when we pursue gain at the expense of others. But God doesn’t have a limited number of treasures to distribute. When you store up treasures for yourself in heaven, it doesn’t reduce the treasures available to others. In fact, it is by serving God and others that we store up heavenly treasures. Everyone gains; no one loses.

You are made for a person and a place. Jesus is the person. Heaven is the place.

Nothing is wiser than giving first to God, cutting back our expenditures wherever we can, and systematically paying off our debts to others, having placed ourselves through our faithful giving under God's blessing instead of His curse.

In the midst of prosperity, the challenge for believers is to handle wealth in such a way that it acts as a blessing, not a curse.

Is It Unloving to Speak of Hell? If you were giving some friends directions to Denver and you knew that one road led there but a second road ended at a sharp cliff around a blind corner, would you talk only about the safe road? No. You would tell them about both, especially if you knew that the road to destruction was wider and more traveled. In fact, it would be terribly unloving not to warn them about that other road.

The conflicting missions of the two armies seemed to have no fog, no gray, only black-and-white clarity. I had lived my life in terms of compromise, rule-bending, trade-offs, concessions, bargaining, striking deals, finding middle ground. In these two great armies, there was no such thing. Good was good, and evil was evil, and they shared no common ground.

Sin and death and suffering and war and poverty are not natural—they are the devastating results of our rebellion against God. We long for a return to Paradise—a perfect world, without the corruption of sin, where God walks with us and talks with us in the cool of the day.

It's a law of life: the tyranny of things.

Give regularly. Stewardship is not a once-a-year consideration, but a week-to-week, month-to-month commitment requiring discipline and consistency.

Am I getting braver, or just getting accustomed to being terrified?

Give worshipfully. Our giving is a reflexive response to God's grace. It doesn't come out of our altruism - it comes out of the transforming work of Christ in us.

A nominal Christian often discovers in suffering that his faith has been in his church, denomination, or family tradition, but not Christ. As he faces evil and suffering, he may lose his faith. But that’s actually a good thing. I have sympathy for people who lose their faith, but any faith lost in suffering wasn’t a faith worth keeping.

Those who know their unworthiness seize grace as a hungry man seizes bread: the self-righteous resent grace.

Jesus' miracles provide us with a sample of the meaning of redemption: a freeing of creation from the shackles of sin and evil and a reinstatement of creaturely living as intended by God.

Many atheistic books and blogs seethe with anger. Remarkably, the authors do not limit their anger to Christians. They seem most livid with God. I don't believe in leprechauns, but I haven't dedicated my life to battling them. I suppose if I believed that people's faith in leprechauns poisoned civilization, I might get angry with members of leprechaun churches. But there's one thing I'm quite sure I wouldn't do: I would not get angry with leprechauns. Why not? Because I can't get angry with someone I know doesn't exist.

If you're a child of God, you do not just "go around once" on Earth. You don't get just one earthly life. You get another-one far better and without end. You'll inhabit the New Earth! You'll live with the God you cherish and the people you love as an undying person on an undying Earth.

It's curious that the Church has become the most tightfisted at the very time in history when God has provided most generously. There's considerable talk about the end of the age, and many people seem to believe that Christ will return in their lifetime. But why is it that expecting Christ's return hasn't radically influenced our giving? Why is it that people who believe in the soon return of Christ are so quick to build their own financial empires--which prophecy tells us will perish--and so slow to build God's kingdom?

Parents who spoil their children out of 'love' should realize that they are performing acts of child abuse. Although there are no laws against such abuse--no man-made laws anyway--this spiritual mistreatment may result in as much long-term personal and social damage as the worst physical abuse.

The greatest deterrent to giving is the illusion that this earth is our home.

Christians are God's delivery people, through whom he does his giving to a needy world. We are conduits of God's grace to others. Our eternal investment portfolio should be full of the most strategic kingdom-building projects to which we can disburse God's funds.

Wealth is a relational barrier. It keeps us from having open relationships.

To turn the tide of materialism in the Christian community, we desperately need bold models of kingdom-centered living. Despite our need to do it in a way that doesn't glorify people, we must hear each other's stories about giving or else our people will not learn to give.

He who lays up treasures on earth spends his life backing away from his treasures. To him, death is loss. He who lays up treasures in heaven looks forward to eternity; he's moving daily toward his treasures. To him, death is gain. He who spends his life moving toward his treasures has reason to rejoice. Are you despairing or rejoicing?

Someday this upside-down world will be turned right side up. Nothing in all eternity will turn it back again. If we are wise, we will use our brief lives on earth positioning ourselves for the turn.

If I try to make only enough money for my family' immediate needs, it may violate Scripture. ...Even though earning just enough to meet the needs of my family may seem non materialistic, it's actually selfish when I could earn enough to care for others as well.

The grace that has freed us from bondage to sin is desperately needed to free us from our bondage to materialism.

Contrary to common belief, Christian fiction did not begin with Catherine Marshall, Janette Oke, or Frank Peretti.