Quotes from Randy Alcorn

Because satan hates us, he's determined to rob us of the joy we'd have if we believed what God tells us about the magnificent world to come.

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.

No pretense or wearing masks. No cliques. No hidden agendas, backroom deals, betrayals, secret ambitions, plots, or schemes.

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.

wisdom begins with the humility to say there's a great deal I don't understand.

Foulgrin's Rule Twenty-Three: tactics without strategy are useless.

I'd rather be tried by 12 than carried by six.

The people of God ought to be the happiest people in all the wide world! People should be coming to us constantly and asking the source of our joy and delight. A. W. TOZER

As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." God's thoughts are indeed higher than ours, but when he reduces his thoughts into words and reveals them in Scripture, he expects us to study them, meditate on them, and understand them—again, not exhaustively, but accurately.

Set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. (Colossians 3:1) This is a direct command to set our hearts on Heaven. And to make sure we don't miss the importance of a heaven-centered life, the next verse says, Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. God commands us to set our hearts and minds on Heaven.

O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water" (Psalm 63:1). We may imagine we want a thousand different things, but God is the one we really long for. His presence brings satisfaction; his absence brings thirst and longing.

When Christ died on the cross for us, he said, It is finished (John 19:30). The Greek word translated it is finished was commonly written across certificates of debt when they were canceled. It meant paid in full. Christ died so that the certificate of debt, consisting of all our sins, could once and for all be marked paid in full.

To the baby who dies it makes no difference whether those who refused to protect her were proabortion or merely prochoice.

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

Matthew Henry, the Puritan preacher and Bible commentator, made this statement after a thief stole his money: "Let me be thankful first because I was never robbed before; second, although they took my purse, they did not take my life; third, because, although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed.

I feel like a child who has found a wonderful trail in the woods. Countless others have gone before and blazed the trail, but to the child it's as new and fresh as if it had never been walked before. The child is invariably anxious for others to join in the great adventure. It's something that can only be understood by actual experience. Those who've begun the journey, and certainly those who've gone further than I, will readily understand what I am saying.

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.

Father to teenage son: My relationship with you is more important than anything I've got to say to you.

We can't surrender to the culture. We've minimized the role of fathers, so we've created a generation of barbarians, children who become men without growing up. They stay in boyhood through their 20s and 30s, sometimes their whole lives. They think of themselves first, indulge in pornography, do what they feel like, leave their wives, and culture, and churches to raise their children.

For every American who believes he's going to Hell, there are 120 who believe they're going to Heaven.

If your faith is based on lack of affliction, it's on the brink of extinction and is only a frightening diagnosis or a shattering phone call away from collapse. Token faith will not survive suffering. Nor should it.

Each day every man comes closer to the day of his death. Those who lay up their treasures in Thuros spend each day moving away from them. Those who lay up their treasures in Charis spend each day moving toward them.

Whether or not the tithe is still the minimal measure of those firstfruits, I ask myself, Does God expect His New Covenant children to give less or more? Jesus raised the spiritual bar; He never lowered it (Matthew 5:27–28).

Delaying giving as a strategy for future kingdom building is risky. We could hold on to assets out of fear of letting go or unwillingness to surrender control to the Lord. As long as money lies within our grasp, there's not only the danger that we'll lose the assets, but also that we'll change our minds or be seduced by the status, prestige, and recognition of controlling (or having our name attached to the distribution of) what belongs to God.