There is no success without sacrifice. If you succeed without sacrifice it is because someone has suffered before you. If you sacrifice without success it is because someone will succeed after.

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace.

All we have-ourselves-to Him, and if that be all, that is enough.

You can impress from a distance, but you can only impact up close.

Discipleship never consists in this or that specific action: it is always a decision, either for or against Jesus Christ.

Live Like a Narnian: Christian Discipleship in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles

His voice leads us not into timid discipleship but into bold witness.

No man has the mind of Christ, except him who makes it his business to obey him.

We have suffered from the preaching of cheap grace. Grace is free, but it is not cheap. People will take anything that is free, but they are not interested in discipleship. They will take Christ as Savior but not as Lord.

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

I surrendered unto Him all there was of me; everything! Then for the first time I realized what it meant to have real power.

Knowing that we are fulfilling God‘s purpose is the only thing that gives rest to the restless human heart.

The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.

The only humility that is really ours is not that which we try to show before God in prayer, but that which we carry with us, and carry out, in our ordinary conduct; the insignficances of daily life are the importances and the tests of eternity, because they prove what really is the spirit that possesses us.

Salvation is free, but discipleship costs everything we have

To be as good as our fathers, we must be better. Imitation is not discipleship. When some one sent a cracked plate to China to have a set made, every piece in the new set had a crack in it.

In order to develop a pioneering missional spirit, a capacity for genuine ecclesial innovation, let along engender daring discipleship, we are going to need the capacity to take a courageous stand when and where necessary.

You cannot impart what you do not possess.

Childlike surrender and trust, I believe, is the defining spirit of authentic discipleship.

Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations

I dare not say with Paul that I am the slave of Christ, but my highest aspiration and desire is to be the slave of Christ.

Our journey of discipleship is not a dash around the track, nor is it fully comparable to a lengthy marathon. In truth, it is a lifelong migration toward a more celestial world.

We must assess our thoughts and beliefs and reckon whether they are moving us closer to conformity to Christ or farther away from it.

When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

To be converted to faith in Jesus Christ is to return to the worship of the true God, and to dethrone all rivals to his authority.

So we have neighbors to bless, children to protect, the poor to lift up, and the truth to defend. We have wrongs to make right, truths to share, and good to do. In short, we have a life of devoted discipleship to give in demonstrating our love of the Lord. We can’t quit and we can’t go back.

It is the Father’s life, and the Father’s life alone, that ever lives the Christian life. It is the Father’s life, and Father’s life alone, which will live the Christian life in you. Embrace a formula or a list in order to “live the Christian life,” and you are doomed to frustration.

If thou art willing to suffer no adversity, how wilt thou be the friend of Christ?

Discipleship is based solely on devotion to Jesus Christ, not on following after a particular belief or doctrine.

Remember: He WANTS your fellowship, and He has done everything possible to make it a reality. He has forgiven your sins, at the cost of His own dear Son. He has given you His Word, and the priceless privilege of prayer and worship.

To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.

Our problem is that we are in the Word but not under the Word.

Habits are to the soul what the veins and arteries are to the blood, the courses in which it moves

Discipleship is the pursuit of holiness and happiness. It is the path to our best and happiest self.

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

The soul is “torn apart in a painful condition as long as it prefers the eternal because of its Truth but does not discard the temporal because of familiarity.

It is a lesson we all need – to let alone the things that do not concern us. He has other ways for others to follow Him; all do not go by the same path. It is for each of us to learn the path by which He requires us to follow Him, and to follow Him in that path.

St John, on Christ’s bosom, pray for me in the days of my discipleship, in the house of my faith, in the hour of my death.

Discipleship’ as a term has lost its content, and this is one reason why it has been moved aside. I’ve tried to redeem the idea of discipleship, and I think it can be done; you have to get it out of the contemporary mode.

We meet God through entering into a relationship both of dependance on Jesus as our Saviour and Friend and of discipleship to Him as our Lord and Master.

Even the smallest act of discipleship or the tiniest ember of belief can become a blazing bonfire of a consecrated life.

Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge.

At every step of our Christian development and in every sphere of our Christian discipleship, pride is the greatest enemy and humility our greatest friend.

If we are serious about our discipleship, Jesus will eventually request each of us to do those very things which are most difficult for us to do.

Thinking that education is something different from discipling our children is a sure sign that we have been ‘educated‘ by the state. Education is discipleship.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Let us simplify our lives a little, let us make the changes necessary to focus on the simple, humble path of Christian discipleship.

I have no disciples, being myself an aspirant after discipleship and in search of a guru.

God wants you to find your way back to Him, and the Savior is the way. God wants you to learn of His Son, Jesus Christ, and experience the profound peace and joy that come from following the path of divine discipleship.

Through discipline, discipline is the other side of discipleship. If you want to follow Jesus, you have to have discipline.

In the gospel of Jesus, sincere and costly discipleship always accompanies genuine conversion. The gospel of Jesus teaches men that a mere profession of faith alone is no sound evidence of salvation.

My yoke is easy, and my burden light.

The dues of discipleship are high indeed, and how much we can take so often determines how much we can then give.

Genuine Christianity is more than a relationship with Jesus, as expressed in personal piety, church attendance, Bible
study, and works of charity. It is more than discipleship, more than believing a system of doctrines about God. Genuine Christianity is a way of seeing and comprehending all reality. It is a worldview.

You never graduate from the school of discipleship.

If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.

The goal is not to make you a smarter sinner but to make you like the Savior.

Jesus tapped me on the shoulder and said, Bob, why are you resisting me? I said, I’m not resisting you! He said, You gonna follow me? I said, I’ve never thought about that before! He said, When you’re not following me, you’re resisting me.

No one can sum up all God is able to accomplish through one solitary life, wholly yielded, adjusted, and obedient to Him.

The restoration of the church must surely depend on a new kind of monasticism, which has nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising discipleship, following Christ according to the sermon on the mount.В  I believe the time has come to gather people together to do this.

Whatsoever one would understand what he hears must hasten to put into practice what he has heard.

In the spiritual life only one thing produces genuine joy and that is obedience.

Discipleship is the process of becoming who Jesus would be if he were you.

Christian discipleship does not involve the abandonment of any innocent enjoyment. Any diversion or amusement which we can use so as to receive pleasure and enjoyment to ourselves, and do no harm to others, we are perfectly free to use.

I know the power obedience has of making things easy which seem impossible.

Holiness has never been the driving force of the majority. It is, however, mandatory for anyone who wants to enter the kingdom.

Discipleship is not an offer that man makes to Christ.

In Bright Shadow: C.S. Lewis on the Imagination for Theology and Discipleship

Being a Christan is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God’s will.

Nothing is more important for mature Christian discipleship than a fresh, clear, true vision of the authentic Jesus.

The decision to grow always involves a choice between risk and comfort. This means that to be a follower of Jesus, you must renounce comfort as the ultimate value of your life.

We believers do need to be challenged to a life of committed discipleship, but that challenge needs to be based on the gospel, not on duty or guilt. Duty or guilt may motivate us for awhile, but only a sense of Christ’s love for us will motivate us for a lifetime.

The born-again Christian sees life not as a blurred , confused, meaningless mass, but as something planned and purposeful.

Our Lord‘s conception of discipleship is not that we work for God, but that God works through us.

Until you have given up yourself to Him, you will not have a real self.

Christian education is a bomb with a long fuse – it takes a while to go off.

When God measures a man he puts the tape around the heart, not the head.

Sometimes we are looked upon as people who speak only of prohibitions. Nothing could be further from the truth! Authentic Christian discipleship is marked by a sense of wonder. We stand before the God we know and love as a friend, the vastness of his creation, and the beauty of our Christian faith.

Old-fashioned, Spirit-filled, Christ-honoring, sin-hating, soul-winning, Bible-preaching. It is the hope of the church. It is the hope of the nation. It is the hope of the world.

It is only because he became like us that we can become like him.

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

Your strengths develop your confidence; your weaknesses develop your faith.

We should be more concerned with reaching the lost than pampering the saved.

You teach what you know, but you reproduce what you are.

It is only by a total death to self we can be lost in God.

Those who teach by their doctrine must teach by their life, or else they pull down with one hand what they build up with the other.

Love is the measure of our faith, the inspiration for our obedience, and the true altitude of our discipleship.

The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.

The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing.

It’s a sin to bore people with the Bible.

At the back of it there lies the central citadel of obstinacy: I will not give up my right to myself–the thing God intends you to give up if ever you are going to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.

Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Cheap grace is grace without discipleship.

My greatest fear is not your failure, but your success.