T. D. Jakes Quotes

I'm not perfect. I'm never going to be. And that's the great thing about living the Christian life and trying to live by faith, is you're trying to get better every day. You're trying to improve.

Walk more closely with God. Get nearer to Christ. Seek to exchange hope for assurance. Seek to feel the witness of the Spirit more closely and distinctly every year. Lay aside every weight, and the sin that so easily threatens you. Press towards the mark more earnestly. Fight a better fight, and war a better warfare every year you live. Pray more. Read more. Subdue self more. Love the brethren more. Oh that you may endeavor to grow in grace every year, that the end of your Christian course may be better than the beginning!

Do you wish to grow in grace and be a holy Christian? Then never forget the value of prayer.

Our weaknesses are not as negative as we may believe. They make us rely upon God's grace and power for greater Christlikeness and ministry.

For a person to be truly discipled and growing in their faith, they need more than one person discipling them.

The good news of suffering is that it brings us to the end of ourselves - a purpose it has certainly served in my life. It brings us to the place of honesty, which is the place of desperation, which is the place of faith, which is the place of freedom.

The grace thou hast will soon be less, if thou addest not more to it.

To me, growing into spiritual maturity is becoming less self-conscious and more God-conscious.

God, our Creator, has stored within our minds and personalities, great potential strength and ability. Prayer helps us tap and develop these powers.

Spiritual formation in Christ moves us toward a total interchange of our ideas and images for his.

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

Here's good news: God is even more committed to your change, your growth, and your transformation than you are.

Spiritual maturity is measured in terms of persevering faith, not perfect behavior

As we grow in the knowledge of God's holiness, even though we are growing in the practice of holiness, it seems the gap between our knowledge and our practice always gets wider. This is the Holy Spirit's way of drawing us to more and more holiness.

The degree of our spiritual strength will be in direct proportion to the time we spend in God's Word.

One of the great misconceptions about spiritual growth that develops in a lot of churches is that information alone is adequate to produce transformed human beings. So if we want to have a church of spiritually mature people, let's just keep cramming more and more information into them... Information alone is not adequate for the transformation of the human personality.

In my creature impatience I am often caused to wish that there were some way to bring modern Christians into a deeper spiritual life painlessly by short, easy lessons; but such wishes are vain. No shortcut exists. God has not bowed to our nervous haste nor embraced the methods of our machine age. It is well that we accept the hard truth now: The man who would know God must give time to Him.

There is an enormous difference between growing old in the Lord and growing up in Him. One is automatic and requires no effort at all ... just aging. But the other is never automatic, or easy. It calls for personal discipline, continual determination, and spiritual desire. Churches are full of sleepy saints who are merely 'logging time' in God's family.

Spiritual growth is marked by a growing realization of just how much grace you need.

It just took all of that to come to a screeching halt, to get to the point of having nothing, for me to finally realize, Hey, what are you fighting with this for? Until then, I hadn't claimed my faith as my own; I had just grown up with it.

My worldview, my philosophy, my attitudes, my relationships, my parenting, my marriage - everything has been transformed by my relationship with Christ.

I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.

When granted many years of life, growing old in age is natural, but growing old with grace is a choice. Growing older with grace is possible for all who will set their hearts and minds on the Giver of grace, the Lord Jesus Christ.

I have discovered that just because we grow weaker physically as we age, it doesn't mean that we must grow weaker spiritually.

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.