"It is of no use for any of you to try to be soul-winners if you are not bearing fruit in your own lives. How can you serve the Lord with your lips if you do not serve Him with your lives? How can you preach His gospel with your tongues, when with hands, feet, and heart you are preaching the devil's gospel, and setting up an antichrist by your practical unholiness?"
- Charles Spurgeon
"Jesus' decree to love and pray for our opponents is regarded as one of the most breathtaking and gut-wrenching challenges of his entire Sermon on the Mount, a speech renowned for its outrageous
claims. There was no record of any other spiritual leader ever having articulated such a clear-cut, unambiguous command for people to express compassion to those who are actively working
against their best interests."
-Lee Strobel
"The fruit of the Spirit is not push, drive, climb, grasp and trample.
Life is more than a climb to the top of the heap."
- Richard J. Foster
"The world is full of men who want to be right when actually the secret of a man's strength and his pathway to true honour is his ability to admit fault when he has failed. God wants to fill the church with men who can say they are wrong when they are wrong.
A man who is willing to humble himself before God and his family and say, "I was wrong." will find that his family has all the confidence in the world in him and will much more readily follow him. If he stubbornly refuses to repent or admit he was wrong, their confidence in him and in his leadership erodes."
-Jim Anderson
"Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. To these I commit my day."
-Max Lucado
"Again and again the Sermon on the Mount calls and challenges us to a life of radical discipleship. Note: when Jesus says 'Blessed are the. . . merciful, peacemakers', and so on, he doesn't just mean that they themselves are blessed. He means that the
blessing of God's kingdom works precisely through those people into the wider world. That is how God's kingdom comes. That's one thing to hear afresh."
-N. T. Wright
"When the root is bitterness, imagine what the fruit might be."
- Woodrow Kroll
"5 I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.
6 If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.
7 If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.
8 Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples.
9 As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love."
- Jesus Christ, John 15 v 5 - 9. KJV