Bethany > Bethany's Quotes

“The national anthem of Hell is 'I did it my way.”
― Peter Kreeft

“The history of the world suggests that without love of God there is little likelihood of a love for man that does not become corrupt.”
― Francois Fenelon

“When God knows you're ready for the responsibility of commitment, He'll reveal the right person under the right circumstances.”
― Joshua Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye

“Don’t concern yourself with being right in others’ eyes. And don’t secretly hope that their lives will fall apart so that your opinion will be vindicated. Instead, concentrate on obeying God in your own life and, when possible, helping others to obey Him as well. You don’t have to prove others wrong to continue on the course you know God has shown you.”
― Joshua Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye

“But then I realize there is never going to be a day when I stand before God and He looks at me and says, 'I wish you would have kept more for yourself.' I'm confident that God will take care of me.”
― David Platt, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream

“The modern-day gospel says, 'God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Therefore, follow these steps, and you can be saved.' Meanwhile, the biblical gospel says, 'You are an enemy of God, dead in your sin, & in your present state of rebellion, you are not even able to see that you need life, much less to cause yourself to come to life. Therefore, you are radically dependent on God to do something in your life that you could never do.”
― David Platt, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream

“God beckons storm clouds and they come. He tells the wind to blow and the rain to fall, and they obey immediately. He speaks to the mountains, 'You go there,' and He says to the seas, 'You stop here, and they do it. Everything in all creation responds in obedience to the Creator...until we get to you and me. We have the audacity to look God in the face and say, 'No.”
― David Platt, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream

“Every saved person this side of heaven owes the gospel to every lost person this side of hell.”
― David Platt, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream

“A materialistic world will not be won to Christ by a materialistic church.”
― David Platt

“When the time comes to die, make sure that all you have to do is die!”
― Jim Elliot, The Journals of Jim Elliot

“Does it make sense to pray for guidance about the future if we are not obeying in the thing that lies before us today? How many momentous events in Scripture depended on one person's seemingly small act of obedience! Rest assured: Do what God tells you to do now, and, depend upon it, you will be shown what to do next.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, Quest for Love: True Stories of Passion and Purity

“Maturity starts with the willingness to give oneself.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me Be a Woman

“There is nothing worth living for, unless it is worth dying for.”
― Elisabeth Elliot

“Restlessness and impatience change nothing except our peace and joy. Peace does not dwell in outward things, but in the heart prepared to wait trustfully and quietly on Him who has all things safely in His hands.”
― Elisabeth Elliott

“Choices will continually be necessary and -- let us not forget -- possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we can do nothing but act on them.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, Discipline: The Glad Surrender

“Stand true to your calling to be a man. Real women will always be relieved and grateful when men are willing to be men”
― Elizabeth Elliot, The Mark of a Man

“One does not surrender a life in an instant. That which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime.”
― Elisabeth Elliot

“There is no ongoing spiritual life without this process of letting go. At the precise point where we refuse, growth stops. If we hold tightly to anything given to us, unwilling to let it go when the time comes to let it go or unwilling to allow it to be used as the Giver means it to be used, we stunt the growth of the soul. It is easy to make a mistake here, “If God gave it to me,” we say, “its mine. I can do what I want with it.” No. The truth is that it is ours to thank Him for and ours to offer back to Him, ours to relinquish, ours to lose, ours to let go of – if we want to find our true selves, if we want real life, if our hearts are set on glory.”
― Elisabeth Elliot

“Faith's most severe tests come not when we see nothing, but when we see a stunning array of evidence that seems to prove our faith vain.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, These Strange Ashes

“The world looks for happiness through self-assertion. The Christian knows that joy is found in self-abandonment. 'If a man will let himself be lost for My sake,' Jesus said, 'he will find his true self.' A Christian woman's true freedom lies on the other side of a very small gate---humble obedience---but that gate leads out into a largeness of life undreamed of by the liberators of the world, to a place where the God-given differentiation between the sexes is not obfuscated but celebrated, where our inequalities are seen as essential to the image of God, for it is in male and female, in male as male and female as female, not as two identical and interchangeable halves, that the image is manifested.”
― Elisabeth Elliot

“Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God is of a different nature altogether. It does not hate tragedy. It never denies reality. It stands in the very teeth of suffering. The love of God did not protect His own Son. The cross was the proof of His love – that He gave that Son, that He let Him go to Calvary’s cross, though “legions of angels” might have rescued Him. He will not necessarily protect us - not from anything it takes to make us like His Son. A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process.”
― Elisabeth Elliot

“To love God is to love His will. It is to wait quietly for life to be measured by One who knows us through and through. It is to be content with His timing and His wise appointment.”
― Elisabeth Elliot

“Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship ''in spirit and in truth.'' Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me Be a Woman

“We are not meant to die merely in order to be dead. God could not want that for the creatures to whom He has given the breath of life. We die in order to live.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ's Control

“When obedience to God contradicts what I think will give me pleasure, let me ask myself if I love Him.”
― Elisabeth Elliot

“But the question to precede all others, which finally determines the course of our lives is What do I really want? Was it to love what God commands, in the words of the collect, and to desire what He promises? Did I want what I wanted, or did I want what He wanted, no matter what it might cost?”
― Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ's Control

“The will of God is never exactly what you expect it to be. It may seem to be much worse, but in the end it's going to be a lot better and a lot bigger.”
― Elisabeth Elliot

“God is God. I dethrone Him in my heart if I demand that He act in ways that satisfy my idea of justice. It is the same spirit that taunted, "If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the Cross." There is unbelief, there is even rebellion, in the attitude that says, "God has no right to do this to five men unless...”
― Elisabeth Elliot, Through Gates of Splendor

“The life of faith is lived one day at a time, and it has to be lived - not always looked forward to as though the "real" living were around the next corner. It is today for which we are responsible. God still owns tomorrow.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me Be a Woman

“I took it for granted that there must be a few men left in the world who had that kind of strength. I assumed that those men would also be looking for women with principle. I did not want to be among the marked-down goods on the bargain table, cheap because they’d been pawed over. Crowds collect there. It is only the few who will pay full price. "You get what you pay for.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ's Control