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Hudson Taylor was scheduled to speak at a large church in Melbourne, Australia. The moderator of the service introduced the missionary in eloquent and glowing terms. He told the large congregation all that Taylor had accomplished in China, and then presented him as “our illustrious guest.” Taylor stood quietly for a moment, and then opened his message by saying, “Dear friends, I am the little servant of an illustrious Master.”

Source: Wycliffe Handbook of Preaching and Preachers, Warren Wiersbe

“Compassion can’t be measured in dollars and cents. It does come with a price tag, but that price tag isn’t the amount of money spent. The price tag is love.”—J. C. Watts Jr.

Source: Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, Volume 54

“To look at the window . . .as I did that first day . . . to look out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible.”—John Glenn, speaking about his view of the Earth from the space shuttle Discovery

Source: World Magazine

John Dyer, a Welsh poet and pastor from the 1700s once wrote, “A man may go to Heaven without health, without riches, without honors, without learning, without friends; but he can never go there without Christ.” Today our world is filled with people who are seeking some other way to God than the one found in the blood of Jesus and His precious name, but all such efforts are doomed to failure. Jesus is the only Way to Heaven.

Source: Forty Thousand Quotations, Charles Noel Douglas

Famed World War II tank commander General George Patton said, “Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.” If you give in to your fears, you are on the path to defeat. If instead you stand strong in spite of your fears, you are on the path to victory. And we must never forget that we are not in the battle alone. With the power of God on our side, we cannot be defeated.

Amy Carmichael, missionary to India wrote, “Blessed are the single-hearted, for they shall enjoy much peace…If you refuse to be hurried and pressed, if you stay your soul on God, nothing can keep you from that clearness of spirit which is life and peace. In that stillness you know what His will is.”

Winston Churchill said, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” That may be a common response to truth, but it places those who respond thusly on the road to tragedy and destruction. There is no way to love and follow God without loving and following truth. The two cannot be separated.

“In great measure, according to the purity and perfections of the instrument, will be the success. It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God.”—Robert Murray McCheyne

During World War II a young soldier named David Webster of Easy Company of the 101st Airborne wrote his mother: "Stop worrying about me. I joined the parachutists to fight. I intend to fight. If necessary, I shall die fighting, but don’t worry about this because no war can be won without young men dying. Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice."

“You may talk about power; but, if you neglect the one Book that God has given you as the one instrument through which He imparts and exercises His power, you will not have it. You may read many books and go to many conventions and you may have your all-night prayer meetings to pray for the power of the Holy Ghost; but unless you keep in constant and close association with the one Book, the Bible, you will not have power.

One day Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, came to him with a wrathful letter written to a Major-General who had accused him of favoritism. Stanton read Lincoln the letter which was full of sharp retorts and the President told him it was a good letter that the general deserved.

While Stanton, much gratified, was folding up the letter and putting it into its envelope, the President asked him, “What are you going to do with it now?”

“Why, send it, of course,” replied Stanton, looking blank.

“Don’t do it,” said Lincoln.

When James Calvert went out as a missionary to the cannibals of the Fiji Islands, the ship captain tried to turn him back, saying, “You will lose your life and the lives of those with you if you go among such savages.” To that, Calvert replied, “We died before we came here.”

Source: The Mission-Minded Family, Ann Dunagan

Submitted by the homiletics class of West Coast Baptist College

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”—Bernard Shaw

“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.”—Thomas Jefferson

Source: The Chautauquan, Volume 5, Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle

“Praying mothers are America’s greatest assets.”—Theodore Roosevelt

“A mother’s lap is the best place from which to launch a life.”—Sarah Hupp

“She’s someone who will listen to your problems until you are bored with them.”—Ellen Goodman

“No one is poor who had a godly mother.”—Abraham Lincoln

“Together is the most beautiful word in the dictionary outside of the word mother.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson (when speaking about the benefits of unity)

The Israeli settlement of Netzarim in the heart of the Gaza Strip was a point of much conflict with militant Palestinians for several years. The conflict was so great that the settlement was evacuated in 2005.

Those who lived in Netzarim did so at great personal risk because they felt it was an important part of keeping their land free. A schoolteacher, Shlomit Ziv, who lived in Netzarim in 2001 said, “I don’t live where it’s comfortable; I live where it’s important to live.”

“Commitments are sustained through strong inward motives.”—Unknown

On one occasion Michelangelo, the great artist, turned on his fellow artists in a spirit of indignation. He said: “Why do you keep filling gallery after gallery with endless pictures on the one theme of Christ in weakness, Christ on the Cross, and most of all, Christ hanging dead? Why do you concentrate on the passing episode as if it were the last work, as if the curtain dropped on Him with disaster and defeat? That dreadful scene lasted…a few hours. But to the unending eternity, Christ is alive; the stone has been rolled away and He rules and reigns and triumphs!”

“Christmas is the promise, and Easter is the proof.”

Source: Unknown

“A wife or husband may remain faithful and may give evidence of careful attention in matters pertaining to each other, and yet there may be a decline in first love. Similarly, a church member may be very regular in his attendance at the services, but no amount of activity, however intense, can compensate for a lack of love.”—Lehman Strauss