Category: Inspirational Sayings

21Feb

Billy Graham Dies at 99

“I have read the last page of the Bible. It’s all going to turn out all right.”(Billy Graham)

Billy Graham, “America’s Pastor”, has died today at age 99. It is said that through his evangelistic crusades, radio shows, and TV programs, he reached an estimated 2.2 billion people in his lifetime. Wikipedia notes: According to his staff, more than 3.2 million people have responded to the invitation at Billy Graham Crusades to “accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior”.

Graham was born in Charlotte, NC, and grew up on a milk farm. He became passionate about evangelism shortly after his own decision to come forward at an “altar call.” Though he had been raised Presbyterian, he switched to the Southern Baptist faith. NPR reports:

In his determination to replicate the evangelical style, Graham read the sermons of notable preachers and then practiced delivering them himself. According to his biographer, William Martin, Graham regularly closed himself in a tool shed and “preached to oil cans and lawnmowers. Or he paddled a canoe to a lonely spot on the river and called on snakes and alligators and tree stumps to repent of their sins and accept Jesus.”

He went to Wheaton college, where he met his future wife, Ruth. He briefly had a pastorate in a Baptist Church, then soon followed his passion into mass evangelism. His big break came at a tent meeting in Los Angeles. Originally scheduled for three weeks, these meetings were so popular that they were extended to eight. 350,000 people attended.

He is quoted as saying “I don’t need a successor, only willing hands to accept the torch for a new generation.” Very few of those hands will have the outsized impact that he had.

16Jan

MLK Jr on Doing Your Best

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted,or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

10Nov

Tolkien: Good and Ill

“Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men.”
(Aragorn, in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994. Print.)

31Oct

“God Help Me!”

Luther, on trial for his life at the Diet of Worms, refused to recant his writings. Here is the famous conclusion of his speech, as determined by Reformation Scholar Keiko Olbermann:

“Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures or by evident reason-for I can believe neither pope nor councils alone, as it is clear that they have erred repeatedly and contradicted themselves-I consider myself convicted by the testimony of Holy Scripture, which is my basis; my conscience is captive to the Word of God. Thus I cannot and will not recant, because acting against one’s conscience is neither safe nor sound. God help me. Amen.”

(Luther is often quoted as saying “Here I stand, I can do no other.” While stirring, this is felt by most Luther scholars to be spurious).

See Christianity Today article “What Luther Said“.

30Sep

Wonder Woman’s Insight

“Only Love can truly save the world.”
(“Wonder Woman” 2017)

“God is Love.”
(1 John 4:8, The Holy Bible)

19Jun

Our Great Trust Fund

Romans 8:18 is one of those oft quoted passages which many find to be a source of comfort in their times of trial. Saint Paul weighs present day sufferings against a future glory so vast that everything that tempts us to worry and fret simply pales into nothing:

“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”

I recently listened to an old podcast sermon by Tim Keller, and a particular quote really grabbed my interest, and reminded me of the power of perspective. The following isn’t an exact quote, but comes close:

“If you are a Christian, if you lose something in this world it’s like someone pickpocketed 25 cents off you, when you have billions somewhere safe in a trust fund.”

(This was a tossed off remark; the full sermon discussing the part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount which is the source of the term “strait and narrow”, is available online at Gospel in Life).

22May

Preaching Through Deeds

“Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.”

This quote is of unknown origin. Frequently it is misattributed to St. Francis of Assissi, who nonetheless once stated something fairly similar in sentiment:

Chapter XVII of his Rule of 1221, Francis told the friars not to preach unless they had received the proper permission to do so. Then he added, “Let all the brothers, however, preach by their deeds.” (St Anthony Messenger)

01Mar

The Tao of Christianity

I knew a Taoist engineering professor, who often repeated the phrase: “He who knows the priority–what comes first and what comes second–knows the Tao, or the way that he must go.”

Christianity could almost be summed thus: “He who knows the Way (Christ), knows the priority.”

22Jan

Memento Mori–A Tolstoy Quote For The Day

“Memento mori—remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die—what makes this any different from a half hour?”
(Leo Tolstoy)

10Nov

Solzhenitsyn on Forgetting God

“Men have forgotten God”

image

Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

(Source: “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag”, an address by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn given when he received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion on May of 1983).

(Image credit: This is an image from the Nationaal Archief, the Dutch National Archives, and Spaarnestad Photo, accessed on Wikimedia Commons, and used in accordance with Creative Commons 3.0 license).