Top 35 Quotes & Sayings by Stephen Kendrick

Excellence means representing the reputation of Christ well. It means doing all things as best as you can...

Alex [Kendrick] and I started out the whole film-making journey as a desire to reach people for Christ and try to impact their lives for him.

Almost every sinful action ever committed can be traced back to a selfish motive. It is a trait we hate in other people but justify in ourselves.

We still had the prayer support of our church. We shot this film [War Room] in Charlotte, North Carolina, and we had about 85 churches rise up and support us across racial and denominational lines, and many of them were praying for us, and we built some prayer teams where we had people on set praying.

Movies are definitely more fun because there are so many different seasons in a movie. It is exciting to be drafting together. Writing a book is very hard, it's like writing 15 college term papers in a row, and you are just like, "when is going to end?" You can communicate so much more when you are writing a book, and you can go so much deeper.

If I'm doing something as an offering unto the Lord, I want to give God my best.

By the time we got to Courageous, we were bringing in more outsiders, so any time we would bring in outsiders, we would offer to pay them, and [as for volunteers from] the church, because they were getting the benefit of the income to all the ministries of the church and the mission, the building program and all those things, they knew up-front that they were volunteering and gladly did so.

Love chooses to believe the best about people. It gives them the benefit of the doubt. It refuses to fill in the unknowns with negative assumptions. And when our worst hopes are proven to be true, love makes every effort to deal with them and move forward. As much as possible, love focuses on the positive.

Selfishness is like a disease that suffocates our capacity to love. While love asks us to deny ourselves for the sake of another, selfishness demands we put ourselves first at their expense. When we choose to be self-centered, we become less kind and content—more needy, sensitive, and demanding. More unsatisfiable. Moodiness and impatience, laziness and irresponsibility, are only selfishness in disguise.

Too often, parents force their kids into becoming something they want them to become rather than trying unpack the treasure chest God wants them to become.

We [me and Alex Kendrick] had our pastor's blessing back in 2013 to launch out, and so we shot [ War Room] last year, in 2014, but we still had the church pray over us , before the movie hit theatres, and the pastor was asking God to bless the film, and so we're very excited about what's happening .

Jesus communicated parables to the secular people around him and he used stories that were very relevant to their lives, and He was taking heaven's truth and packaging it in an earthly context.

Don't try to tackle a two-hour feature movie as your first project. Cut your teeth on a smaller level and work through the kinks at that level and build your strength as you go.

That word is 'willing.' It's an attitude and spirit of cooperation that should permeate our conversations. It's like a palm tree by the ocean that endures the greatest winds because it knows how to gracefully bend.

Well that's basically how we launched Sherwood Pictures, and with our films, we sat down and we had a long list of specific things that we were praying for God to provide, and then we would just deal with all those things in prayer first, and then when we went out and began knocking on doors and calling, it was clear that God was going before us and providing the way and sending the resources.

In churches, we see that getting people to show up for a prayer meeting is a lot more difficult than a concert or service project or just about anything else. So we were thinking, we're stepping into some unknown territory here that could be as profitable, or it could be a box-office flop, but there was a rightness about it. And so this whole idea of the war room being like a spiritual warfare room, a place of prayer where you get alone with God and you're making your decisions and you're dealing with your issues first in prayer.

Often parents have a great desire and hopes, and aspirations for their kids but they don't have any practical plans of action.

With Courageous, it was the first film where we really began to pay our cast. Because the church owned the previous films and we started so small, with such small budgets, people were just volunteering on the cast and crew.

One of the days we unpack finding out how your kids are wired, what kind of intelligence has God given them, how do they give and receive love, what the passions of their life, how does their birth order and their gender affect them because all of those things are part of the tapestry that God is weaving together to use each of our children for His glory.

There is an old story from the Eastern tradition that says that when the gods created the universe, they found a place for everything but the truth, and this created a problem, because the gods did not want this wisdom discovered right away. One of the gods suggested the top of the highest mountain, another the farthest star, a third spoke up for the dark side of the moon, and another for the bottom of the deepest ocean. Finally, they decide to place truth inside the human heart. In that way, we would search for it all over the universe, with the secret within us all the time.

You must choose to live by enouragement rather than by expectations.

Nobody knows you as well as our spouse. And that means no one will be quicker to recognize a change when you deliberately start sacrificing your wants and wishes to make sure his or her needs are met.

I feel like God has intrusted a lot into me and I don't want to sit on it and be selfish. I want to think long term on how we can help this next generation of Christian filmmakers to make a big impact for God.

We grew up in a praying home [with Alex Kendrick], we saw incredible answers to prayer in our parents' lives, they grew up in praying homes, our father launched a Christian school with nothing, basically he had some people that believed in the project but they had very little resources, and we watched our parents deal with those issues first in prayer, and then when they went out knocking on doors they saw amazing doors answered and resources come in.

The only way love can last a lifetime is if it’s unconditional.

Sometimes it wasn't even when we were knocking on doors, it would be, the phone would ring and somebody would say, "God told me to do this," and it would be exactly the perfect timing to help us with the next step of the filmmaking.

With every movie, we will spend a season of prayer just asking God what's on his heart, and we spent about a year, two years, in prayer, trying to figure out the direction for the next film.

But after about a year praying, there was just this clear direction. The leadership team believed that God was leading us to focus on fatherhood. If God is leading, then God will provide. So we begin to get storyline ideas that lined up with the subject of fatherhood that we're working on and fitting, and we were thinking, okay this is good. At the same time, as we are studying scriptures and we're on our journey as fathers, we are learning about fatherhood every day.

Prayer doesn't sound like a cool hot topic that would cause people to rush to the theatre, stand in line, and buy tickets about prayer.

The only way love can last a lifetime is if it's unconditional. The truth is this: love is not determined by the one being loved but rather by the one choosing to love.

Your quality of life is directly tied to the amount of love flowing in you and through you to others. Though it’s often overlooked, love is infinitely more valuable than riches, fame, or honor. They will pass away, but love remains.

Get in God's word every day. God's word equips us for everything we do.

Patience gives your spouse permission to be human. It understands that everyone fails. When a mistake is made, it chooses to give them more time that they deserve to correct it. It gives you the ability to hold on during the rough times in your relationship rather than bailing out under the pressure.

There must be a stronger foundation than mere friendship or sexual attraction. Unconditional love, agape love, will not be swayed by time or circumstances.

I'm not trying to force something, but I do enjoy working behind the scenes and I do enjoy bringing all of the ingredients to the kitchen so that we can make the movie.