Jesus, like any good fisherman, first catches the fish; then He cleans them.
Mark Potter
Jesus, like any good fisherman, first catches the fish; then He cleans them.
Discipleship
Jesus, like any good fisherman, first catches the fish; then He cleans them.
N T Wright
The teaching of the gospel itself, and of the way of life which flows from it, must not be a muddled, rambling thing, going this way and that over all kinds of complex issues. It must go straight to the point and make it clearly, so that the young Christians who so badly need building up in their faith may learn the deep, rich, basic elements of Christian teaching.
C. S. Lewis
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what he is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but he is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself.
Ed Silvoso
People made righteous by Christ must connect with the unrighteous world to make right(eous) that which is wrong (or crooked), so that others may also obtain peace and joy. This is the pattern we see in the New Testament: Once wrongs were righted by righteous deeds, it opened doors for divinely inspired peace and joy to replace human despair and sorrow. This was accomplished by tangible deeds (not just words) produced by divine power, because “the Kingdom of God does not consist in words but in power” (1 Corinthians 4:20).
Francis Chan
True discipleship involves deep relationships. Jesus didn’t a simply lead a weekly Bible study, he lived life with disciples and taught through actions as well as words.
Ed Silvoso
Jesus did not confine the gathering of His followers to buildings or subject them to a rigid schedule of centralized meetings. Instead, it was people who constituted His Ekklesia (wherever and whenever as few as two or three gathered, with His manifest presence in their midst). And because Jesus’ Ekklesia was not meant to be a sterile, sanitized holding tank into which His disciples were to store in isolation converts fished out of a turbulent and doomed sea, to await the arrival of a refrigerator ship for transfer to a heavenly port for final processing.
Dallas Willard
Individually the disciple and friend of Jesus who has learned to work shoulder to shoulder with his or her Lord stands in this world as a point of contact between heaven and earth, a kind of Jacob’s ladder by which the angels of God may ascend from and descend into human life. Thus the disciple stands as an envoy or a receiver by which the kingdom of God is conveyed into every quarter of human affairs.
Katherine Walden
Leaders and Pastor: If your church is full of people who look like you, talk like you, and think like you, then you have failed to lead people to Christ. Your goal should never be to create a church full of ‘mini-me’s who think like you, dress like you, talk like you, and who agree with every doctrinal point you make. Your goal is to lead them to Christ and to allow His empowering grace to fashion each individual into a believer who can think for themselves, pull out Biblical truths for themselves, and who can rightly discern God’s will and direction for their lives. There should never be a spoken or unspoken threat to ‘tow the company line or else’ policy in your church structure.
Alexander MacLaren
No one who has not tried it would believe how many difficulties are cleared out of a man’s road by the simple act of trying to follow Christ.
Oswald Chambers
We are not to make men converts of our opinions. But we are to make them disciples of Jesus.