You're Welcome: most highlighted quotes

A few days ago, I came across an Amazon page indicating the top highlighted quotes of all time on the Kindle. By no surprise, there were a ton of Hunger Games quotes. Either way, it was pretty interesting to see the things which stuck out to the most people reading ALL books found on the Kindle at this point. Here were some of my favorites:

#1 - "Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them." - Catching Fire, Hunger Games 

#4 - "It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it takes to fall apart."  - Mocking Jay, Hunger Games

#8 - "Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us." - Pride & Prejudice

#23 - "What is childlike humility? It’s not the lack of intelligence, but the lack of guile. The lack of an agenda. It’s that precious, fleeting time before we have accumulated enough pride or position to care what other people might think" - Heaven is for Real

#31 - “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.” - 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

#33 - "While the goal of the American dream is to make much of us, the goal of the gospel is to make much of God." - Radical

#36 - "Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying." - Outliers

#38 - "life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent." - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

#45 - "Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are." - Steve Jobs

Faith Budget: oxymoron

It was a classic case of, "Oh yeah, I've heard of that book, but who is [author's name]." I had heard plenty about Radical. Several friend have read and raved about it, but I had never heard the name David Platt until my time at Catalyst. Putting the book with its author's name was only the beginning. David is an example of James 3:17. His wisdom is considerate, full of mercy, impartial, and sincere, but it is incredibly bold and blunt (as it should be).

I am king of honing in on statements probably meant to be 'filler' or flippant, because the statement David said that struck me most was:

"Budget season is where we come face to face with how little we trust God's word."

I have always said that if your creativity is based on your budget, then you aren't creative at all. But this statement cuts a bit deeper.

I remember the first time I heard the term "faith budget". It was a term I was never taught in all my ministry classes. Once I learned how a faith works, I got used to determining what I would seek to accomplish in ministry based on how much my budget offered me to do.

This quote was not easy to hear or apply. Truth often has this effect.

When budget season comes around, it inevitably comes with stress. Why is that? It is because we are worried. We are worried whether or not we will have the money to continue the things we are doing in ministry. We are worried whether or not we will have the money to accomplish the dreams we had for ministry this coming year. We are worried whether we will have the money to accomplish all the evangelistic methods we have acquired. (What a shame Jesus didn't have the advanced evangelistic methods we have today.)

But the starker reality is that we are worried that God's grace and the gospel of Jesus is not really sufficient. We are worried that Christ and him crucified might not be enough.

I'd say the Holy Spirit is accomplishing great things without the resources and budgets that we have here in the American Church, but we have come up with so much stuff to get us and others excited about Jesus...as he needed those things to prove how incredible he is.

I need to change some things...

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* David Platt's Church and David Platt's Book

*Catalyst Debrief