Rick Warren Quotes

I had my breakthrough at 6 years old and received the Lord, Jesus Christ. I was so swept up in the spirit, I told my parents I had future plans to enter the priesthood.

After more than sixty years of almost daily reading of the Bible, I never fail to find it always new and marvelously in tune with the changing needs of every day.

My father was a minister for 50 years with Pentecostal Church of God in Christ. We prayed about everything, every day, then he always said, "Amen. God is love." I thought God is love was one word. Like "Godislove." And it took me a long time to learn what that really meant.

I'm really passionate about God and religion, and I thought maybe I'm supposed to be a pastor.

What the purpose of my life is about is I want to become the kind of person that God wants me to become, and through my study of the scriptures, I can articulate the kind of person that God would be happy if I become.

Billy Graham is one of my great lifetime heroes. I think he epitomizes the essence of what a Christian leader should be. I have participated in some of his crusades a couple of times in Atlanta. I've seen the profound impact he's had on me personally, and on other people who were not Christians and accepted Christ as Savior.

I'm not a practice religion freak. I didn't grow up in a religious family, but I have a faith.

When you become consumed by God's call on your life, everything will take on new meaning and significance. You will begin to see every facet of your life - including your pain - as a means through which God can work to bring others to Himself.

I've been following Jesus for 35 years. He's guided me, comforted me, encouraged me, challenged me, befriended me, and been my constant companion since November 8, 1981.

Wave after wave of trial rolled over us; but at the end of the year some of us were constrained to confess, that we had learned more of the loving-kindness of the Lord than in any previous year of our lives.

Twenty-four years ago I went through a profound conversion of heart and God led me to the Catholic Church. A few years later I felt Him calling me to start a Bible study program.

The goal of the Christian is to grow up into Christ.

I didn't have a rigidly enforced religious parental pressure, but I did have a few years in my mid-teens of turning to religion, and it was very meaningful to me.

I didn't become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not because of indoctrination or a sudden revelation, but because I spent month after month working with church folks who simply wanted to help neighbors who were down on their luck no matter what they looked like, or where they came from, or who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those neighborhoods, that I first heard God's spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose - His purpose.

Let us strive, every year we live, to become more deeply acquainted with Scripture.

Because I am a Christian, therefore, every day in which I do not penetrate more deeply into the knowledge of God's Word in Holy Scripture is a lost day for me. I can only move forward with certainty upon the firm ground of the Word of God. And, as a Christian, I learn to know the Holy Scriptures in no other way than by hearing the Word preached and by prayerful meditation.

Being a Christian is not just about following commandments: it is about letting Christ take possession of our lives and transform them.

If the devil cannot keep you from being saved, if next he fails to make you backslide, then he undertakes to keep you just an average Christian. Here he succeeds with most believers.

I have made it a practice for several years to read the Bible through in the course of every year. I usually devote to this reading the first hour after I rise every morning. As, including the Apocrypha, it contains about fourteen hundred chapters, and as I meet with occasional interruptions, when this reading is for single days, and sometimes for weeks, or even months, suspended, my rule is to read five chapters every morning, which leaves an allowance of about one-forth of the time for such interruptions.

Scripture is profitable for training in righteousness. No one succeeds at the highest level in sports without working out. No one makes it in music without lots of practice. No one excels in scholarship without years of study. And no one makes it far in the school of holiness without hours and days and years in the word. You and I simply will not mature as quickly, minister as effectively, or live as gloriously without immersing ourselves in the Scriptures. We need the Bible if we are to be competent Christians.

The overwhelming joy of conversion or a new calling is often followed by feelings of being overwhelmed with duties and doctrines. The first joyous feelings are real and give one much-needed initial momentum. But the genuine exhilaration is soon followed by the need to perspire and to pedal.

Our mission as Christians is to conform ourselves evermore to Jesus as the model of our lives.

An ongoing relationship with God through His Word is essential to the Christian's consistent victory!

I was raised in a wonderful family of faith. It was church on Sunday morning and grace before dinner, but my Christian faith became real for me when I made a personal decision for Christ when I was a freshman in college, and I've tried to live that out however imperfectly every day of my life since, and with my wife at my side, we've followed a calling in the public service where we've tried to keep faith with values that we cherish.

I was raised pretty much a fundamentalist, but the one thing that fundamentalism gave to me was the love for that book and a commitment to read and study it. The difficulty is that I've read it all, I didn't skip around, I read it all, and when you read it all, you can't take it literally because you don't want to blame God for a lot of stuff that occurs in that book. There are some pretty violent scenes.