Rick Warren Quotes

Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.

There is nothing noble about suffering except the love and forgiveness with which we meet it. Many believe that if they are suffering they are closer to God, but I have met very few who could keep their heart open to their suffering enough for that to be true. (124)

God's way of answering the Christian's prayer for more patience, experience, hope and love often is to put him into the furnace of affliction.

The single dynamic that helps people be most aware of God and most experiencing the fruit of the Spirit is gratitude.

'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up, Whose golden rounds are our calamities, Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed. True it is that Death's face seems stern and cold When he is sent to summon those we love; But all God's angels come to us disguised; Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, One after another, lift their frowning masks, And we behold the Seraph's face beneath, All radiant with the Glory and the calm Of having looked upon the front of God.

There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.

Accept the long night patiently, quietly, humbly, and resignedly as intended for your true good. It is not a punishment for sin committed but an instrument of annihilating egoism.

True, God hates Alzheimer's, spinal cord injury, mental illness, autism, and the rest (these conditions are all symptoms of the Fall). Yet he permits these things to accomplish something far more precious in our lives: patience, endurance, compassion for others who hurt, and refined faith and trust in God, to name a few.

Being human, we would expel from our lives physical pain and mental anguish and assure ourselves of continual ease and comfort, but if we were to close the doors upon sorrow and distress, we might be excluding our greatest friends and benefactors. Suffering can make saints of people as they learn patience, long-suffering, and self-mastery.

Let not therefore thy heart be troubled, neither let it fear. Trust in me, and put thy confidence in my mercy. When thou thinkest thyself farthest off from me, oftentimes I am nearest unto thee. When thou countest almost all to be lost, then oftentimes the greatest gain of reward is close at hand. All is not lost, when any thing falleth out contrary. Thou oughtest not to judge according to present feeling; nor so to take any grief, or give thyself over to it.

Many people are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed; they chew the bitter pill which they would not even know to be bitter if they had the sense to swallow it whole in a cup of patience and water.

I was very afraid at the beginning, until Master told me that pain isn't the truth; it's what you have to get through in order to find the truth.

To pray is to change. This is a great grace. How good of God to provide a path whereby our lives can be taken over by love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control.

Enlightenment isn't found with a full stomach, or on a soft pillow.

Do not desire crosses, unless you have borne those already laid upon you well — it is an abuse to long after martyrdom while unable to bear an insult patiently.

The times we find ourselves having to wait on others may be the perfect opportunities to train ourselves to wait on the Lord.

The monk at St. Meinrad took his hands and placed them on my shoulders, peered straight into my eyes and said, ‘I hope you’ll hear what I’m about to tell you. I hope you’ll hear it all the way down to your toes. When you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing. You’re doing the most important something there is. You’re allowing your soul to grow up. If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.

When God wants to make a mushroom, he does it overnight, but when He wants to make a giant oak, He takes a hundred years. Great souls are grown through struggles and storms and seasons of suffering. Be patient with the process.

If you can cultivate the right attitude, your enemies are your best spiritual teachers because their presence provides you with the opportunity to enhance and develop tolerance, patience and understanding.

Genuine happiness consists in those spiritual qualities of love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness and so on. For it is these which provide both for our happiness and others happiness.

When God gets us alone through suffering, heartbreak, temptation, disappointment, sickness, or by thwarted friendship - when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are totally speechless, unable to ask even one question, then He begins to teach us.

a young woman in love always looks like patience on a monument smiling at grief

And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love.

When we choose only love as the director of our mind we can experience the power and miracle of love.