Quotes from James MacDonald

God brings tests into your life because your faith in Him--your belief that He is in control and that He is good--can be proved only in times when life is hard.

The biggest obstacle to making Christ magnificent is the refusal to make yourself small.

You can't teach a person to love something. But you can get him to feel the heat of your love for something.

Let God Himself be the main attraction at church again, and let us be tireless in our insistence that church is for God, about God, through God, and to the glory of His great Son.

Church leaders raised on rationalism lead ministries where the supernatural, the Vertical, is suppressed and where God Himself is at best an observer and certainly seldom, if ever, and obvious participant in church.

The reason God responds to persistence is because prayer is changing the one who prays. As we pray, God is making us spiritually fit to receive what He is already willing to do.

Remember, it's not "stand firm for the faith" but "stand firm in the faith." You've got to own it and live it.

When we ask people what they want in church instead of giving them what they were created to long for, we play in the very idolatry that church was created to dismantle.

In a society where rationality has ruled so long, the church frequently fails to see that in forsaking the weekly pursuit of the transcendent, we have given up the only ground that was uniquely ours in this world. In attempting to make the church something that can attract and add value to secular mind-sets, we have turned our backs on our one true proposition - transcendence.

To disrespect a person made in the image and likeness of God is a lot worse than desecrating a flag. We should be offended and repulsed in the same way when God's image bearers are desecrated – abused, beaten, neglected, discriminated against, and not loved and taken care of as they should be.

At the end of life, each of us must answer the question, Whose story captured my soul?

The fundamental question in everything we do must be: Will this honor God? Does this display Jesus Christ? Does this make people see how awesome the LORD is? Failure to answer "Yes!" invites Ichabod. I have many, many wonderful

Satan mounts his mutiny against God through a deceitful stronghold: God is untrustworthy. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, he places God's heart on trial by whispering insidious lies: "God is holding back on you. He wants you to jump through hoops in order to earn His love. He's stingy. He doesn't have your best interest in mind. You're better off trusting in yourself. Your resources and functional saviors work better then waiting and trusting in Him.

God's Word doesn't change, the message doesn't shift. It can't be compromised in any way. It's where we stand firm.

Sin does not remain a contented servant; it seeks to seize and master its participants.

Suffering always reveal idols of the heart.

The body of Christ is about doing life together, and by doing life together sin is revealed.

If all you are doing is spending time with the struggling members of your church and you are not building proactively into your church's culture, and you are being shortsighted and limiting the effectiveness of your ministry.

Satan's kryptonite is separation through slander. He slanders God to us and us to God.

Praying is what confirms our true belief that we cannot succeed without God, and its absence confirms the exact opposite.

This is God's world, so everything, even if it intends to efface God, bears witness to God – understood and interpreted through biblical eyeglasses.

We must rip the foundations out from under all the bastions of human reasoning that say, "I don't need God!" We must demolish every non-God story of life. We must pulverize every God-is-not-good life narrative.

If you don't tell your kids/grandkids what God has done for you, don't expect their hearts to be captured by your God! Worst

God forgive the church of Jesus Christ for trading its birthright access to the transcendent for the pot of stew that is horizontal helpfulness. How shortsighted and human centered. The outcome of this disaster is that we have created a Creator in our own image who weeps, cares, and longs to help, but in the end we doubt He can because we have made Him so much like ourselves. In making God our buddy, we find Him nice for cuddling but not much help when the hurricane comes.