Quotes from Randy Alcorn

He that serves God for money will serve the devil for better wages.' 

NUESTRA CONDUCTA SEXUAL REVELA QUIÉN O QUÉ GOBIERNA NUESTRA VIDA.

God] hangs on to his fallen original creation and salvages it. He refuses to abandon the work of his hands—in fact, he sacrifices his own Son to save his original project. Humankind, which has botched its original mandate and the whole creation along with it, is given another chance in Christ; we are reinstated as God's managers on earth. The original good creation is to be restored."[2]

Tolstoy said, "The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: 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 allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, go hungry, are abused and exploited, or go to Hell.

Consider her words: "I think if I could have seen the shore, I would have made it." For believers, that shore is Jesus and being with him in the place that he promised to prepare for us, where we will live with him forever. The shore we should look for is that of the New Earth. If we can see through the fog and picture our eternal home in our mind's eye, it will comfort and energize us.

Albert Wolters points out that most of Christ's miracles "are miracles of restoration—restoration to health, restoration to life, restoration to freedom from demonic possession. 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.

Never believe a man who says God no longer does miracles, Ben. But never believe a man who says God must do a miracle the way a man wants him to. God is God.

Biblical religion . . . views the whole course of history as a movement from a garden to a city, and it fundamentally affirms that movement. . . . Redemption in Jesus Christ reaches just as far as the fall.

The human race is homesick for Eden, which only two humans have ever known. We spend our lives chasing peaceful delight, following dead ends or cul-de-sacs in pursuit of home. We know intuitively that we've wandered. What we don't know is how to return. Our lives are largely the story of the often wrong and occasionally right turns we take in our attempts to get home to Happiness with a capital H—God himself.

Whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him" (Hebrews 11:6, emphasis added). Call that payoff contentment, satisfaction, peace, or excitement—it all adds up to one word: happiness

Jewel the Unicorn] cried.- I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.... Come further up, come further in!

What God made us to desire, and therefore what we do desire if we admit it, is exactly what he promises to those who follow Jesus Christ: a resurrected life in a resurrected body, with the resurrected Christ on a resurrected Earth.

Charles Spurgeon's answer was to recognize that whatever God's Word teaches is true, whether or not it all makes sense to us. He said, I

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) has been widely credited with saying, "Jesus promised His disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.

Religion professor Albert Wolters, in Creation Regained, writes, "[God] hangs on to his fallen original creation and salvages it. He refuses to abandon the work of his hands—in fact, he sacrifices his own Son to save his original project. Humankind, which has botched its original mandate and the whole creation along with it, is given another chance in Christ; we are reinstated as God's managers on earth. The original good creation is to be restored."74

The Spirit's work is not to make us holy, in order that we may be pardoned; but to show us the cross, where the pardon is to be found by the unholy; so that having found the pardon there, we may begin the life of holiness to which we are called." —Horatius Bonar

Christ's resurrection is the forerunner of our own, and our resurrection is the forerunner of the earth's.

The sovereignty of God is the one impregnable rock to which the suffering human heart must cling. The circumstances surrounding our lives are no accident: they may be the work of evil, but that evil is held firmly within the mighty hand of our sovereign God." —Margaret Clarkson

Now, in comparison to both Matthew 17 and Revelation 1, it appears that the risen Christ, before his ascension, was not yet fully glorified. If he would have been glorified, surely his identity would have been immediately apparent to Mary Magdalene (John 20:14), the disciples on the Emmaus road (Luke 24:15-16), and Peter and the apostles when they saw him on the shore (John 21:4). Consider

Our enemy slanders three things: God's person, God's people, and God's place—namely, Heaven.29

When you pretend you don't feel hurt or angry or devastated, you're not fooling God. Be honest! Don't misunderstand; I am not encouraging you to be angry at God or to blame him. He deserves no blame. Rather, I am encouraging you to honestly confess to God your feelings of hurt, resentment, and anger. Often we look at suffering from our perspective and forget that God sees from another vantage point.

Heaven isn't an extrapolation of earthly thinking; Earth is an extension of Heaven, made by the Creator King.

Our desires correspond precisely to God's plans. It's not that we want something, so we engage in wishful thinking that what we want exists. It's the opposite—the reason we want it is precisely because God has planned for it to exist. As we'll see, resurrected people living in a resurrected universe isn't our idea—it's God's.

There is a powerful relationship between our true spiritual condition and our attitude and actions concerning money and possessions.