E. Stanley Jones

Our actions are the results of our intentions and our intelligence.

The opponent strikes you on your cheek, and you strike him on the heart by your amazing spiritual audacity in turning the other cheek. You wrest the offensive from him by refusing to take his weapons, by keeping your own, and by striking him in his conscience from a higher level. He hits you physically, and you hit him spiritually.

If I throw out a boathook from the boat and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me, or do I pull myself to the shore? Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God.

To live by worry is to live against reality

We are not quite sure that the Sermon on the Mount is the Sermon for the mart. We are not sure, and an unsure place is an unsafe place* We must go on or go back. We must be more Christian or less.

To implant fear in the minds of children is a crime. If parents try to rule the child by fear, then fear rules the child.

We grow small trying to be great.

At the cross God wrapped his heart in flesh and blood and let it be nailed to the cross for our redemption.

Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: Prayer is co-operation with God. It is the purest exercise of the faculties God has given us - an exercise that links these faculties with the Maker to work out the intentions He had in mind in their creation.

Prayer is commission. Out of the quietness with God, power is generated that turns the spiritual machinery of the world. When you pray, you begin to feel the sense of being sent, that the divine compulsion is upon you.

Prayer is aligning ourselves with the purposes of God.

Our intentions may be very good, but, because the intelligence is limited, the action may turn out to be a mistake - a mistake, but not necessarily a sin, for sin comes out of a wrong intention.

Fear is sand in the machinery of life.

Many live in dread of what is coming. Why should we? The unknown puts adventure into life. ... The unexpected around the corner gives a sense of anticipation and surprise. Thank God for the unknown future.

The inner life is bruised by a running against the laws of the Kingdom. The bruises are guilt complexes, a sense of inferiority, of missing the mark, of being out of harmony with God and with oneself, a sense of wrongness. Divine forgiveness wipes out all that sense of inner hurt and condemnation. Brings a sense of at-homeness- at home with God and oneself and with life. The universe opens its arms and takes one in. You are accepted- by God, by yourself, and by life. All self-loathing, self-rejection, all inferiorities drop away. You are a child of God; born from above, you walk the earth, a conqueror, afraid of nothing. Healed at the heart, you can say to life: "Come on, I'm ready for anything.

The Sermon on the Mount seems dangerous. It challenges the whole underlying conception on which modern society is built. It would replace it by a new conception, animate it with a new motive, and turn it toward a new goal.