Quotes from Stephen Mansfield

God is God, and I'm not.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affections. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Clearly, we are given faith and we are taught knowledge, but to make both productive, we have to devote ourselves to a lifelong project of developing traits, attitudes, and habits.

It is as though there is a splinter working its way to the surface, only this splinter is in your soul. And just as the skin wants a foreign object gone and pushes it out, the soul wants to be healthy and will not leave you in peace until you stop drenching it with the poisons of your feelings about the past.

Prophets (must) humbly accept the truth that they see through a glass darkly, that they know only in part. In other words, they make mistakes. Mature prophets urge everyone to who they prophesy to judge, test and compare with scripture everything they say. They are not offended when people are careful.

My central belief, though, is that men are made to protect the territory assigned to them and to assure that everything within that territory fulfills its God-ordained purpose. This is what manhood is designed for. This is how a man fulfills his purpose. His decision to "own" his field moves both the best that is within him and the best that God has to offer into that partnership I call Great Manhood.

You must not think of them [Hebrews 12 Cloud of Witnesses] as perfect saints who never suffered as we do. Instead you must see them as the flawed and the betrayed and the wounded who simply chose to live above the programming of their pain.

behind all great achievement there lies great toil: nothing that is worth doing is done easily."41

So we forgive. We send away the wrongs done to us. We let people out of the little cages we keep them in while we enjoy our feelings of moral superiority. We hand the feelings of wrong to God and refuse to ever take them back. Then we shut up and never mention the matter again. When the time comes, we put our arm around the offender and we ask him how he is.

When church becomes for us an anointed have, when the grace is flowing and all is well we become sentimental...we remake people into what we need them to be. We are not wise in our love, prudent in our commitments, knowing in our fellowship. And so the evil comes and we are first amazed and then destroyed and then knocked off our axis as if never to return.

QUALITIES OF A GREAT GENERAL" 1. Tactically aggressive (loves a fight) 2. Strength of character 3. Steadiness of purpose 4. Acceptance of responsibility 5. Energy 6. Good health and strength George Patton Cadet

exertion. We live in an opulent blandness—overfed, overtended, overentertained, and overly preoccupied with ourselves. But men need aggressive physical lives. They need contest and conquest, strain and struggle. Otherwise, we lose ourselves to softness and effeminacy. It is not much of a surprise that a New Testament word that is translated effeminate from the original Greek actually means "soft through luxury." It is a warning.

There is no such thing as perfection in a church. Instead, what you should be looking for is a covenanted body, a leadership team that has the goods for coaching you in Christ, and a place where you can invest yourself - from cleaning toilets to teaching what you know to ministering in song.

Hard times are painful, but also redemptive—meaning that in the hand of God they accomplish good things in our lives.

We had hoped. It is what we say on the other side, when our vision is shattered and we feel ourselves to be fools for trusting in something we couldn't even see.

The loftiest statement of your cleansing and redemption—after all the pain you've endured—is that now you realize what God was doing and you can get on with that high calling for your life.

You are destined for your hardships because you are destined for great works of God.

But the truth is, when it comes to emotional pain—the pain that registers inside—the greatest damage is often the thing that continues to resonate when the feeling of the pain subsides. It is that message that the pain tells us about ourselves and about the meaning of our lives.

When an Antarctic expedition in 1933 returned to the site of an earlier expedition in 1929, a member of the team reported that at the abandoned station "there were also four bottles of Guinness on a shelf, which, although frozen, were put to excellent use.

It is testimony to the importance of beer in their story that the brewery was the first permanent building the Pilgrims constructed.

I suggest you pray Psalm 23:3 every day. Lord, please be my good shepherd and restore my soul.

But running from emotional pain is never a good idea, as it only leaves us damaged of soul and hindered in our ability to fulfill our purpose. We have to turn and face our torturous seasons and the scars they try to leave on our hearts.

It is a great art of living to be able to hear truth in the mouth of your enemies. Even those who hate you and mean to hurt you may still be right about what they see in your life. Though they shout their observations and probably intend them to wound you rather than help you, still they are giving you insight that can help you improve.

There are also the Roman Catholic churches that display plaques in honor of Arthur Guinness, a Protestant, for his outspoken defense of Roman Catholic rights.