Quotes from Andy Stanley

Doing it anyway" is really the only way to ensure that fear doesn't rob you of an opportunity. "Doing it anyway" is the essence of courage. Courage is the willingness to move in a direction in spite of the emotions and thoughts that bid you to do otherwise.

Preaching for life change requires far less information and more application. Less explanation and more inspiration. Less first century and more twenty-first century.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage assumes fear. If we had waited for our fear to subside before we took that first plunge off of the high-dive, we would all still be standing there waiting. We just jumped anyway. Courage is the willingness to strap on your fear and move ahead.

If God has birthed a vision in you, he is in the process of developing a similar vision in the hearts of others around you.

An unwillingness to accept risk has swamped more leaders than anything I can think of.

Too many church leaders have bought into the myth that to clarify the win means establishing attendance goals and raising a lot of money.

Seasoned leaders rarely regret having taken risks. Even the risks that didn't pay off directly are viewed as a necessary part of the journey. A leader's regrets generally revolve around missed opportunities, not risks taken. Many of those missed opportunities would not have been missed had they been willing to push through their fear and embrace what could be. Fear, not a lack of good ideas, is usually what keeps a man or woman standing on the sidelines.

individual does. Here's the difference: Eventually a leader's lust for progress overwhelms his reluctance to take risks. In other words, failure to move things forward is the type of failure most feared by the leader. For the leader, failure is defined in terms of missed opportunities rather than failed enterprises.

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. (EPHESIANS 5:21)

Participants in the new covenant are not required to obey most of the commandments found in the first half of their Bibles. Participants in the new covenant are expected to obey the single command Jesus issued as part of his new covenant. Namely: As I have loved you, so you must love one another.7

I tell the girls in our student ministry, "You don't really want sex. What you want is intimacy. You want to meet a guy, fall in love, and know you can trust him completely. You want somebody with whom you can share everything there is to know about you without fear of betrayal or rejection. You want to be fully known and to know him fully. Purity now paves the way to intimacy later.

You were not, are not, and should be glad you're not included in that covenant.

The church is not here to win. Just the opposite. By every human measure, our Savior lost. On purpose. With a purpose.

Likewise, most of the world goes to bed at night under the assumption that if they were to die in their sleep, they would find themselves standing at the pearly gates. After all, good people go to heaven. And just about everybody thinks they are good.

If there's an area in your life where you tell yourself, "I know this is wrong, but I'm going to do it anyway, and probably repeat it," Solomon would answer, "In that area of your life, you're a fool." And

Don't be so concerned about keeping the folks you've got, that you neglect the folks you're trying to reach.

Mockers are cynical, critical, condescending, and controlling. You always feel off balance around them. You never know where you stand. They always try to come across as the smartest person in the room, and they use that supposed knowledge to try to dominate and manipulate their world and their relationships. Look

The tendency in business, or in church work for that matter, is to mistake activity for progress. We think that just because people are busy and doing a lot of stuff that we are being successful. The fact of the matter is, if all that activity isn't taking you where you want to go, then it's just wasted time.

If a teenage guy tends to overreact when he fails, there is a pretty good chance he thinks his significance is based on success.

Fire in the fireplace is a wonderful thing. Fire on the carpet has the potential to burn down your house. Sex is like fire. In the right context, it is an awesome thing. But once it is outside the context it was designed for, sex can burn your life and relationships to the ground.

The best way to know if someone is prepared to commit is to examine his or her prior commitments. If you want to know how someone will behave tomorrow, take a look at what he or she did yesterday.

We should discipline with the goal of teaching our children the critical life skill of making things right with the people they've wronged.

VISIONEERING = INSPIRATION + CONVICTION + ACTION + DETERMINATION + COMPLETION

The God of Christianity never claims to be fair. He goes beyond fair. The Bible teaches that he decided not to give us what we deserve--that's mercy. In addition, God decided to give us what we don't deserve--we call that grace.