Thomas S. Monson Quotes

How wonderful it is to be surprised by God’s call, to embrace his word, and to walk in the footsteps of Jesus... Your life will become richer and more joyful each day!

Doctrinal rightness and rightness of ecclesiastical position are important, but only as a starting point to go on into a living relationship - and not as ends in themselves.

Being a Christian means renouncing ourselves, taking up the cross and carrying it with Jesus. There is no other way.

Religious people love to hide behind religion. They love the rules of religion more than they love Jesus. With practice, Condemners let rules become more important than the spiritual life.

The disciple of Jesus is not the deluxe or heavy-duty model of the Christian-especially padded, textured, streamlined, and empowered for the fast lane on the straight and narrow way. He stands on the pages of the New Testament as the first level of basic transportation in the kingdom of God.

The cross is not a mere event in history; it's a way of life! Take up your cross DAILY, Jesus said!

Real spiritual journey in life is the discovery of self. I think once you take all the religious bullshit away from Jesus Christ, it's saying it's about this journey of discovering who you are, and what's really important in life is simply love. That the journey of civilization, the journey of understanding, is forgiveness, is empathy. And that's what humanity is striving for.

We profess to think Jesus the grandest and most glorious of men, yet hardly care to be like him. When we are offered his Spirit, that is, his very nature within us, for the asking, we will hardly take the trouble to ask for it.

I can conceive of no greater, more romantic and interesting adventure than to undertake to live like Jesus in this complicated day.

It's not easy to follow Jesus' example, and if you go to church it doesn't mean you're automatically doing it.

Where it gets weird is that nowadays there are millions of people on this earth who call themselves followers of Jesus, but their lives look nothing like His, and they're not obeying the things that He called them to do.

That's the secret of Jesus. You watch Jesus and you see he never did "withdraw" and then "attack." All of the time people wanted him to do it and in many ways, but he would not. Then to the body of believers he said, "This will show everyone that you are my disciples, if you love one another," but he had already said, "Love one another as I have loved you." So that's the model.

The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it.

A disciple is a person who has decided that the most important thing in their life is to learn how to do what Jesus said to do.

People who are obsessed with Jesus live lives that connect them with the poor in some way or another. Obsessed people believe that Jesus talked about money and the poor so often because it was really important to Him.

For one man who can introduce another to Jesus Christ by the way he lives and by the atmosphere of his life, there are a thousand who can only talk jargon about him

Followers of Jesus who count the cost and are willing to take up their crosses after him must have broad shoulders.

The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as ‘Christians’ will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.

Carrying the cross does mean following in Jesus' footsteps. And in His footsteps are rejection, brokenheartedness, persecution and death. There are not two Christs - an easy going one for easy going Christians, and a suffering one for exceptional believers. There is only one Christ. Are we willing to follow His lead?

Jesus clearly viewed children as precious - and that if he loved kids enough to say that adults should be more like them, we should spend more time loving them too.

For me, God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit have always been my closest friends in this journey.

We miss Jesus' point entirely when we use His words as weapons against others.

Are we ready to be Christians full-time, showing our commitment by word and deed?

To follow Jesus implies that we enter into a way of life that is given character and shape and direction by the one who calls us. To follow Jesus means picking up rhythms and ways of doing things that are often unsaid but always derivative from Jesus, formed by the influence of Jesus. To follow Jesus means that we can't separate what Jesus is saying from what Jesus is doing and the way that he is doing it. To follow Jesus is as much, or maybe even more, about feet as it is about ears and eyes" (The Way of Jesus, Eugene H. Peterson, 22).

True faith always produces real conformity to Christ.