Quotes About Purpose

Jesus was not short of drive and purpose. Men, who REALLY follow Jesus, might not have all the details of life, but they will possess in increasing measure this kind of redemptive drive that gives life a dramatic sense of purpose.

Man was meant to function like a mirror—something to reflect the image of God into creation.

It's time for manhood to be restored.

Wisdom is skill in living; it is living one's life so that something of lasting value is produced.

God not only saves us from something, He also saves us for something.

God's gospel stirs desire in us, which leads to our working—through His strength, on His desired goals for our lives.

When you look at this stone you see a rock, but when I look at it I see an image in the rock. All I am trying to do is get to the image by removing everything else in the way." That is what God does through the process of restoration. We have been restored already, and yet we are still being restored. The image is there, but a lot is left around it.

If you board the wrong train it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction. —DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

The Scriptures were plain and could not be gainsaid on this most basic point: all that was his—his wealth, his talents, his time—was not really his. It all belonged to God and had been given to him to use for God's purposes and according to God's will. God had blessed him so that he, in turn, might bless others, especially those less fortunate than himself.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning. —C. S. LEWIS

what we desperately do want to avoid is not merely suffering but suffering without meaning.

To some extent a life of celibacy is a picture of how all of us are to live, containing our passions for God's purposes.

However thankful we may be for all our personal pleasures, we mustn't for a moment lose sight of the great things that we're living for, and they must shed light rather than gloom on your joy.

If our suffering has a purpose, it is infinitely easier to bear than if our suffering has no purpose and no larger meaning. When a mother endures childbirth, she knows that it is leading to something life changing and glorious.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered for twenty years in the hellish prison camps he describes in that book, wrote: "Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

God is free not from human beings but for them.

thinking about the deep call of Christ, which was not about winning, but about submission to God, wherever that might lead.

Wilberforce wrote some years later that it was as if he'd been all those years in a dream from which at last now he had been awakened.

nowadays we often ask ourselves whether we still need the Church, whether we still need God. But this question, he said, is wrong. We are the ones who are questioned. The Church exists and God exists, and we are asked whether we are willing to be of service, for God needs us.

one must be more zealous to please God than to avoid sin. One must sacrifice oneself utterly to God's purposes, even to the point of possibly making moral mistakes. One's obedience to God must be forward-oriented and zealous and free, and to be a mere moralist or pietist would make such a life impossible:

He knew that, if left to do as he liked, he might fritter away the rest of his life, just as he'd frittered away so many years already. He knew that he didn't want to go back to where he had been before, and he would take whatever steps were necessary to ensure that he continued on the new path he was now on.

in his mercy, had allowed Wilberforce to see himself as he truly was, and it was crushing. But Wilberforce knew God didn't mean to end there. On the other side of the worst of who he was, if he dared face that worst, was a God who would help him overcome his faults and do great things, the very things for which he had created him. It was not too late.

But since logic dictates that God could have saved the Israelites from Pharaoh's army in an infinity of ways, and in ways infinitely subtler than parting the Red Sea, it is obvious that he didn't part the Red Sea to save the Israelites as much as he parted the Red Sea to communicate himself to the Israelites.

It is hoped and believed," he famously wrote, "that the Lord has raised you up for the good of His church and for the good of the nation.