Alan Paton Quotes

Sometimes my worst day - one filled with pain and suffering - in the eyes of God, is my best day if I've born it cheerfully and I've born it with love.

When the Christian doesn't find joy on account of his happenings, he can always find joy in spite of them.

The single most important thread in working through your disappointments is that your heart and mind ponder and grasp what the cross of Jesus Christ is all about. There is no pattern without the cross. There is no Good News without it. That is what the gospel is all about.

It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.

Suffering, if you're a Christian, suffering is a part of life. And it's not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life... There are all different ways to suffer. One way to suffer is through lack of food and shelter and there's another way to suffer which is lack of dignity and hope and there's all sorts of ways that people suffer and it's not just tangible, it's also intangible and we have to consider both.

Show yourself a Christian by suffering without murmuring. In patience possess your soul - they lose nothing who gain Christ.

To try to fashion something from suffering, to relish our triumphs, and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic.

However dark and profitless, however painful and weary, existence may have become, life is not done, and our Christian character is not won, so long as God has anything left for us to suffer, or anything left for us to do.

Christians have learned that when there seems to be no other evidence of God's love, they cannot escape the cross.

To be a Christian is not only to believe the teaching of Christ, and to practice it; it is not only to try to follow the pattern and example of Christ; it is to be so vitally related to Christ that His life and His power are working in us. It is to be "in Christ," it is for Christ to be in us.

Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.

The longer I live the more I believe that the greatest enemy of a victorious Christian life is passivity.

What comes to a person in his or her life, however difficult it may be, perhaps will help a person move closer to God. The response to tribulation is abr, which is patience, perseverance, steadfastness, and resolve. Allāh loves the patient; part of the reason the tribulation comes is to draw the quality of patience out of them - He loves this quality.

You might as well try to hear without ears or breathe without lungs, as to try to live a Christian life without the Spirit of God in your heart.

Little works, little thoughts, little loves, little prayers for little Christians, and larger and larger as the years grow.

Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime.

A wise man had said that your Christian life is like a three-legged stool. The legs are doctrine, experience and practice, which is obedience; and you, will not stay upright unless all three are there. In recent years many Christians have not kept these three together.

Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive.

The Christian life has been nothing more and nothing less than a daily dependence on and a rediscovery of God's grace.

A true Christian man is distinguished from other men, not so much by his beneficent works, as by his patience.

However much we do to avoid them, we shall never lack crosses in this life if we are in the ranks of the Crucified.

Christian life consists of faith and charity

I have often thought that the best Christians are found in the worst of times.

Suffering prepares you by training you to trust God and know that He is always at work in your life.

When we learn to move through suffering, rather than avoid it, then we greet it differently. We become willing to let it teach us. We even begin to see how God can use it for some larger end.