Quotes about Dedication

If I could relive my life, I would devote my entire ministry to reaching children for God.

I will not waste my life! I will finish my course and finish it well. I will display the Gospel of the grace of God in all I do. I will run my race to the end." - Paul

You don't have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.

Christians do not just go to work. They go to work "with God". They do not just do a job. They do their job "with God".

The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.

Was that a tragedy? Two lives, driven by one great passion, namely, to be spent in unheralded service to the perishing poor for the glory of Jesus Christ—even two decades after most of their American counterparts had retired to throw away their lives on trifles. No, that is not a tragedy. That is a glory. These lives were not wasted. And these lives were not lost. "Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it" (Mark 8:35).

Living to magnify Christ is costly.

Tasks don't have to be high-impact to be worthy of high effort. Most things we do in any given day are relatively low impact. The cumulative impact of thousands of low-impact test is huge. These tasks can be transposed into worship.

After escaping from Paris and finally leaving France entirely, Calvin spent his exile in Basel, Switzerland, between 1534 and 1536. To redeem the time, "he devoted himself to the study of Hebrew." (Imagine such a thing! Would any pastor today, exiled from his church and country, and living in mortal danger, study Hebrew? What has become of the vision of ministry that such a thing seems unthinkable today?)

You don't have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.

What does it mean to be a Christian? Charles Hodge, one of the great nineteenth-century Reformed theologians, sees the answer in this text: "It is being so constrained by a sense of the love of our divine Lord to us, that we consecrate our lives to him."6

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.