Quotes from Bill Hybels

Your energy and the ability to energize others is more valuable than your time.

Those churches have closed down or have been merged with a church that has a more positive vision.

Thirty years ago, we were in a movie theater and thought it was so cool because we were finally delivered from the horrors of stained glass and wooden pews.

It takes a great deal of courage to follow another person's lead.

If you lower the ambient noise of your life and listen expectantly for those whispers of God, your ears will hear them. And when you follow their lead, your world will be rocked.

You're a leader. It's your job to keep your passion hot. Do whatever you have to do, read whatever you have to read, go wherever you have to go to stay fired up. And don't apologize to anybody. 

I would never want to reach out someday with a soft, uncallused hand-a hand never dirtied by serving-and shake the nail-pierced hand of Jesus.

It's the great temptation for small groups of people to slide into a state where they're not quite telling each other the truth and they're not quite celebrating each other. Instead, they tolerate each other, they accommodate each other, and they settle for sitting on the unspoken matters that separate them.

It's not the things I don't understand about the Bible that bother me; it's the things I understand with perfect clarity and don't comply with that keep me up at night.

If you're a serious minded leader, you will read. You will read all you can. You will read when you feel like it, and you will read when you don't. You will do whatever you have to do to increase your leadership input, because you know as well as I do that it will make you better.

The more varied the environments in which you exercise your leadership gift, the stronger that gift will become. You will become a far more effective leader.

There isn't a single motivation, thought, act, or word that has slipped out of your being and escaped the full, undivided attention of God.

Religion is spelled 'D-O', because it consists of the things people do try to somehow gain God's forgiveness and favor. But the problem is that you never know when you've done enough. But thankfully, Christianity is spelled differently. It's spelled 'D-O-N-E', which means that what we could never for ourselves, Christ has already done for us. To become a real Christian is to humbly receive God's gift of forgiveness and to commit to following His leadership.

Simplified living is about more than doing less. It's being who God called us to be, with a wholehearted, single-minded focus. It's walking away from innumerable lesser opportunities in favor of the few to which we've been called and for which we've been created.

The question isn't, "What do I want to get done in the next thirty days?" but, "Who do I want to become in this next season of my life?

Leaders should never apologize for the strength of feeling that accompanies their God-given visions. God designed leaders to experience their longing, their desire, and their drive deeply, and to express it fully. And when they do, they energize others.

God led Jesus to a cross, not a crown, and yet that cross ultimately proved to be the gateway to freedom and forgiveness for every sinner

Vision is a picture of the future that produces passion.

Whatever your quitting point, I challenge you to test God's truth and faithfulness by saying, "God, I'm going to proceed, trusting you to empower me to crash through this quitting point and come out in one piece on the other side.

It is our responsibility to make adjustments so we can live within God's provision and be joyfully content whether He provides a little or a lot in any given season.

it's time to make a decision: I will learn what disciplines are necessary to fuel my prayer life, and I will practice these disciplines regularly, without fail.

Is the ambient noise level of my life low enough for me to hear the whispers of the Lord?

I believe that the great tragedy of the church in our time has been its failure to recognize the importance of the spiritual gift of leadership. It appears to me that only a fraction of pastors worldwide are exercising the spiritual gift of leadership, organizing the church around it, and deploying church members through it. The results, in terms of church growth and worldwide spiritual impact, are staggering.

Delayed gratification is important first and foremost in training children.