Quotes by Randy Alcorn

God doesnt make us rich so we can indulge ourselves and spoil our children, or so we can insulate ourselves form needing Gods provision. God gives us abundant material blessing so that we can give it away, and give it generously.

Wealth is a relational barrier. It keeps us from having open relationships.

In the midst of prosperity, the challenge for believers is to handle wealth in such a way that it acts as a blessing, not a curse.

The opportunities for using our financial resources to spread the gospel and strengthen the church all over the world are greater than theyve ever been. As God raised up Esther for just such a time as hers, Im convinced hes raise us up, with all our wealth, to help fulfill the great commission. The question is, what are we doing with that money? Our job is to make sure it gets to his intended recipients.

If we were to gain Gods perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.

After his wife died, in great pain C. S. Lewis realized, “If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came.”3 Our own suffering is often our wake-up call. But even if you aren’t now facing it, look around and you’ll see many who are....Suffering and evil exert a force that either pushes us away from God or pulls us toward him....Unfortunately, most evangelical churches—whether traditional, liturgical, or emergent—have failed to teach people to think biblically about the realities of evil and suffering. A pastor’s daughter told me, “I was never taught the Christian life was going to be difficult. I’ve discovered it is, and I wasn’t ready.”...On the other side of death, the Bible promises that all who know him will fall into the open arms of a holy, loving, and gracious God—the greatest miracle, the answer to the problem of evil and suffering. He promises us an eternal kingdom on the New Earth, where he says of those who come to trust him in this present world of evil and suffering, “They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21:3–4)

Christians are Gods delivery people, through whom he does his giving to a needy world. We are conduits of Gods grace to others. Our eternal investment portfolio should be full of the most strategic kingdom-building projects to which we can disburse Gods funds.

We cant surrender to the culture. Weve minimized the role of fathers, so weve created a generation of barbarians, children who become men without growing up. They stay in boyhood through their 20s and 30s, sometimes their whole lives. They think of themselves first, indulge in pornography, do what they feel like, leave their wives, and culture, and churches to raise their children.

Good-hearted laughter is a tribute to the happy God, who created laughter and delights to enter into it with us.

Unless we learn how to humbly tell each other our giving stories, our churches will not learn to give.

She was home (in Heaven). She was with the Person she was made for, in the place that was made for her.

If Miss Watson had told Huck what the Bible says about living in a resurrected body and being with people we love on a resurrected Earth with gardens and rivers and mountains and untold adventures--now that would have gotten his attention.

Because satan hates us, hes determined to rob us of the joy wed have if we believed what God tells us about the magnificent world to come.

The most tragic strain in human existence lies in the fact that the pleasure which we find in the things of this life, however good that pleasure may be in itself, is always taken away from us. The things for which men strive hardly ever turn out to be as satisfying as they expected, and in the rare cases in which they do, sooner or later they are snatched away.... For the Christians, all those partial, broken and fleeting perfections which he glimpses in the world around him, which wither in his grasp and he snatches away from him even while the wither, are found again, perfect, complete and lasting in the absolute beauty of God.

For the Christian, death is not the end of adventure but a doorway from a wold where dreams and adventures shrink, to a world where dreams and adventures forever expand.

If youre a child of God, you do not just go around once on Earth. You dont get just one earthly life. You get another-one far better and without end. Youll inhabit the New Earth! Youll live with the God you cherish and the people you love as an undying person on an undying Earth.

Every kingdom work, whether publicly performed or privately endeavored, partakes of the kingdoms imperishable character. Every honest intention, every stumbling word of witness, every resistance of temptation, every motion of repentance, every gesture of concern, every routine engagement, every motion of worship, every struggle towards obedience, every mumbled prayer, everything, literally, which flows out of our faith-relationship with the Ever-Living One, will find its place in the ever-living heavenly order which will dawn at his coming.

Lord Foulgrin: You must not let him see Charis as a place of learning, exploration, duties, travel, companionship, banquets, celebrations, and productive work. A low view of heaven is our ace in the hole. (conspiring to bring Fletcher down after salvation)

He opened the first letter, No Dear Mr. Woods. It was a page full of profanities. There was something oddly refreshing about honest, to-the-point hate mail. No hypocrisy and forced politeness. Too many letters ripped you to shreds, then closed off Sincerely yours.

We are all theologians, either good ones or bad ones. Id rather be a good one. Wouldnt you?