After a writer is dead, some anonymous scholar often collects the best quotes from all of his written works, reducing his laboriously written tomes to a few sound bites. I decided to save this anonymous scholar some work and compile quotations from my writings myself.

“Before I studied church history, I always thought that the flying buttresses of the church were angels.”

“No revival in history ever started in a church headquarters.”

“Historically, there is no such thing as the fall of the church, in the sense that before that time the church was pure and perfectly theologically orthodox. The church was fallen before it was redeemed, and its redemption is not yet complete.”

“The Kingdom of God is a kingdom, not a democracy.”

“Those who pray in the morning pray for guidance. Those who pray in the evening pray for forgiveness.”

“I see many strong Christian leaders in Scripture, but I see none who preached strong leadership as a principle. Strong leaders lead. If people don’t follow someone, that person is probably not a strong leader, and no amount of haranguing potential followers will change a weak leader into a strong one.”

“Too often we fill our pulpits with people who hold positions rather than people who have been given a word from God.”

“The subjunctive is an obsolete verb tense used only by evangelicals in prayer.”

“Life is an inflationary currency. If it is not spent, it gradually devalues until it is gone.”

“I wondered at the man who spent so much time and energy on a car which in ten years will be a heap of rust in somebody’s backyard. But then I considered that in seventy years the man himself will be a heap of dust in some church’s graveyard.”

“Middle age is when you cease training so that you can accomplish something and start concentrating on living long enough to complete it.”

“It is good to live in a land where police search for missing persons rather than create them. It is a blessing to live in a land where polling booths are guarded by seniors and housewives rather than by soldiers with machine guns.”

“The best critics make the worst rulers. The chief characteristic of both is intolerance. The critic demands that the government be perfect. In power, he insists that he is.”

“Napoleon’s Moscow campaign was the quintessential vacation. He started out with high hopes, but the trip was long, he never encountered a friendly face, he couldn’t find adequate food or lodging, the weather was terrible, and he returned home broke, tired, and defeated.”

“Common sense isn’t.”

“Science is not an exact science.”

“That some people cannot walk does not mean that I should not run.”

“When confronted with a wild animal, a tornado, or some other natural hazard, primitive man would run. When confronted with the same phenomena, modern man grabs his cell phone and starts filming. Primitive man was smarter.”

“As any three-year-old hugging a teddy bear can tell you, giving love is as comforting as receiving love.”

“No offense, but I don’t really have time for church,” Sergeant Wesson said. “I have some murders to solve. I’m dealing with matters of life and death.” “So is the church,” John Smyth replied.