Kent Hughes Quotes

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.1

God can have our money and not have our hearts, but He cannot have our hearts without having our money.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the observation that when lust takes control, “At this moment God . . . loses all reality. . . . Satan does not fill us with hatred of God, but with forgetfulness of God.”5

One thing is certain: Nothing will set you apart from culture more than the exclusive claims of Christianity. And it is here that we must intentionally set ourselves apart-because if we do not, we will have no message for the world!

When we are in the grip of lust, the reality of God fades.

Many believers use truth as a license to righteously diminish others’ reputations.

Some fathers exasperate their children by being overly strict and controlling. They need to remember that rearing children is like holding a wet bar of soap — too firm a grasp and it shoots from your hand, too loose a grip and it slides away. A gentle but firm hold keeps you in control.

Television has greater power over the lives of most Americans than any educational system or government or church. It is the control center of most homes-more ubiquitous and more controlling than Orwell's Big Brother

Television has greater power over the lives of most Americans than any educational system, government, or church.

Our devotion must culminate in a conscious yielding of every part of our personality, every ambition, every relationship, and every hope to Him. This done, we have reached the apex of personal devotion

Men, on the most elementary level, you do not have to go to church to be a Christian. You do not have to go home to be married either. But in both cases if you do not, you will have a very poor relationship.

But none of us can claim an innate spiritual advantage. In reality, we are all equally disadvantaged. None of us naturally seeks after God, none is inherently righteous, none instinctively does good (cf. Romans 3:9-18). Therefore, as children of grace, our spiritual discipline is everything — everything! I repeat . . . discipline is everything!

A child who grows up with the realization that his parents are lovers has a wonderful basis of stability.6

No manliness no maturity! No discipline no discipleship! No sweat no sainthood!

If we confuse legalism and discipline, we do so to our soul’s peril.

Train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

a Christian mind demands conscious negation; a Christian mind is impossible without the discipline of refusal.

God can have our money and not have our hearts, but He cannot have our hearts without having all our money.

The true test of a man’s spirituality is not his ability to speak, as we are apt to think, but rather his ability to bridle his tongue.

Jesus is literally the exegesis of God.

Men, it is the “legal” sensualities, the culturally acceptable indulgences, which will take us down. The long hours of indiscriminate TV watching, which is not only culturally cachet but is expected of the American male, is a massive culprit of desensitization. The expected male talk — double entendre, coarse humor, laughter at things which ought to make us blush — is another deadly agent. Acceptable sensualities have insidiously softened Christian men, as statis- tics well attest. A man who succumbs to desensitization of the “legal” sensualities is primed for a fall.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the observation that when lust takes control, “At this moment God . . . loses all reality. . . . Satan does not fill us with hatred of God, but with forgetfulness of God.

Brothers, the Scriptures tell us that in the Church "you have come" (right now!) to these seven sublime realities: 1) to the city of God, 2) to myriads of angels, 3) to fellow believers, 4) to God, 5) to the Church Triumphant, 6) to Jesus, and 7) to forgiveness! If this does not create a wellspring of thanksgiving in your hearts and a longing for fellowship in the visible Church, nothing will!

fixing our thoughts on Jesus requires time, for true reflection cannot happen with a glance. No one can see the beauty of the country as he hurries through it on the interstate. It is only when we sit still and gaze that the landscape fills our souls.

The difference is one of motivation: legalism is self-centered; discipline is God-centered. The legalistic heart says, “I will do this thing to gain merit with God.” The disciplined heart says, “I will do this thing because I love God and want to please Him.

The key to liberation from the power of materialism is not an exodus from culture - abandoning Wall Street or leaving the wealth of the nation to others - but the grace of giving... Givers for God disarm the power of money. They invite God's grace to flow through them.

Thus we understand that giving ourselves for our brides involves prayerful intercession. Men, do you pray for your wives with something more than, “Bless good old Margaret in all she does”? If not, you are sinning against her and against God. Most Christian men who claim to love their wives never offer more than a perfunctory nod to their wives’ needs before God. Men, you ought to have a list of her needs, spoken and unspoken, which you passionately hold up to God out of love for her. Praying is the marital work of a Christian husband!

Few things exasperate a child more than inconsistency. Pity the horse that has a rider who gives it mixed signals, digging his heels into its side and pulling the reins at the same time. Even more, pity the child who has the rules changed by a capricious father, and who is always exasperated because of the conflicting messages he receives.

François Fenelon urged: Tell [God] all that is in your heart, as one unloads one’s heart to a dear friend. . . . People who have no secrets from each other never want for subjects of conversation; they do not . . . weigh their words, because there is nothing to be kept back. Neither do they seek for something to say; they talk out of the abundance of their heart — without consideration, just what they think. . . . Blessed are they who attain to such familiar, unreserved intercourse with God.9

We must begin with the discipline of commitment. I have grown tougher with the years in my demands on couples who want me to perform their wedding ceremonies. I tell them that wedding vows are a volitional commitment to love despite how one feels. I explain that it is rubbish to think one can break one’s vows because one does not “feel” in love. I point out that the Scriptures call us to “put on love” (Colossians 3:14) — and despite the canard about such love being hypocritical, it is never hypocrisy to put on a Christian grace. I tell them that if there is the tiniest thought in the back of their minds that they can get out of the marriage if the other person is not all they expected, I will not perform the ceremony. The truth is, marriages which depend on being “in love” fall apart. Those which look back to the wild promises they vowed in the marriage ceremony are the ones who make it. There is no substitute for covenant plus commitment.

We are accustomed to thinking of Ernest Hemingway as a boozy, undisciplined genius who got through a quart of whiskey a day for the last twenty years of his life but nevertheless had the muse upon him. He was indeed an alcoholic driven by complex passions.2 But when it came to writing, he was the quintessence of discipline! His early writing was characterized by obsessive literary perfectionism as he labored to develop his economy of style, spending hours polishing a sentence, or searching for the mot juste—the right word. It is a well-known fact that he rewrote the conclusion to his novel A Farewell to Arms seventeen times in an effort to get it right. This is characteristic of great writers. Dylan Thomas made over two hundred handwritten(!) manuscript versions of his poem “Fern Hill.”3 Even toward the end, when Hemingway was reaping the ravages of his lifestyle, while writing at his Finca Vigia in Cuba he daily stood before an improvised desk in oversized loafers on yellow tiles from 6:30 A.M. until noon every day, carefully marking his production for the day on a chart. His average was only two pages — five hundred words.4 It was discipline, Ernest Hemingway’s massive literary discipline, which transformed the way his fellow Americans, and people throughout the English-speaking world, expressed themselves.

The mind controlled by lust has an infinite capacity for rationalization.

Alan Loy McGinnis, author of the best-selling The Friendship Factor, says that America’s leading psychologists and therapists estimate that only 10 percent of all men ever have any real friends.2

Again, the emphasis of the language warns against regression, for it literally reads, “You have become having need of milk, not solid food.”4 They had begun to eat solid food early on but were now back on the bottle. The truth is, there is simply no such thing as a static Christian. We either move forward or fall back. We are either climbing or falling. We are either winning or losing. Static, status quo Christianity is a delusion!

Men, as fathers you have such power! You will have this terrible power till you die, like it or not — in your attitude toward authority, in your attitude toward women, in your regard for God and the Church. What terrifying responsibilities! This is truly the power of life and death.

Few have lived as stressful and frenetic a life as Hudson Taylor, founder of China Inland Mission. But Taylor lived in God’s rest, as his son beautifully attests: Day and night this was his secret, “just to roll the burden on the Lord.” Frequently those who were wakeful in the little house at Chinkiang might hear, at two or three in the morning, the soft refrain of Mr. Taylor’s favorite hymn [“Jesus, I am resting, resting in the joy of what Thou art”]. He had learned that for him, only one life was possible — just that blessed life of resting and rejoicing in the Lord under all circumstances, while He dealt with the difficulties, inward and outward, great and small.6 Fellow-Christians, there is a rest for you. It is not beyond your capacity. You can have it if you wish.

Our experience of rest is proportionate to our trusting in him.

In reality, we are all equally disadvantaged. None of us naturally seeks after God, none is inherently righteous, none instinctively does good (cf. Romans 3:9-18). Therefore, as children of grace, our spiritual discipline is everything — everything! I repeat . . . discipline is everything!

As Eugene Peterson has so well said: “Worship is an act which develops feelings for God, not a feeling for

But if you are looking for true fellowship, give yourself to the gospel at home and around the world. Serve together with others in women’s Bible studies, children’s ministries, youth ministries. Do short-term missions. Join mercy work to alleviate suffering in places like the vast area devastated by disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Take the good news to the poor. Join a band of brothers and sisters to pray for the world. That is how you will experience genuine Christian fellowship.

remarked: [I]f our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements , etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.4

When a husband makes difficult decisions, he should do so with the full counsel of his wife.

Headship modeled on the headship of Christ demands a profound life of devotion and intercessory prayer.

Men, if we are not praying in detail for our wives and children, we are sinning.

Both sexes are equal. Both bear the image of God and are equal in their standing and in their spiritual gifts for service.

We will never get anywhere in life without discipline, be it in the arts, business, athletics, or academics.

Sacrificial love dies to self and serves the one it loves in unsung domestic heroism.

An honest answer is an act of love.

But the disturbing truth, as studies by the secular networks as well as the Christian Broadcasting Network show, is that the viewing habits of Christians are no different than those of non-Christians!

The colossal slide of integrity (especially masculine ethics) has grim spiritual, domestic, and political implications which threaten the survival of life as we know it.

Not only did I play at a high level, I learned that personal discipline is the indispensable key for accomplishing anything in this life. I have since come to understand even more that it is, in fact, the mother and handmaiden of what we call genius.

What amazing instruments reside in the three or four pounds between our ears, instruments with greater capacity than a thousand busy New York City switchboards.

This story means that we must live in full consciousness of the miracle of divine providence, understanding that God has total hands-on control of the world—and that all of life is to be lived for him without fear and with increasing expectation. R. Kent Hughes

Among the tragedies of our time is humanity’s pursuit of personal peace apart from God’s enabling grace. That pursuit takes many forms: material, intellectual, social, even religious; but they all end in futility. When sinners find peace through God’s grace, that is beautiful, that is cause for rejoicing! “Grace . . . and peace” is the proper Christian greeting and celebration (v. 2).

Faith spawns reflexive steps of obedience. It steps out. We must not imagine that we have faith if we do not obey.

spiritual discipline frees us from the gravity of this present age and allows us to soar with the saints and angels.

Chivalrous or not, there was no denying that of the 1,667 men on board, only 338, or 20.27 percent, had survived as compared with a 74.35 percent survival rate for the 425 women. On April 21 the bodies of the Titanic’s victims began to be pulled out of the north Atlantic by the Mackay-Bennett, a cable ship that had been sent out from Halifax with a hundred tons of ice and 125 coffins on board. The Mackay-Bennett’s captain described the scene as resembling “a flock of sea gulls resting on the water.… All we could see at first would be the top of the life preservers. They were all floating face upwards, apparently standing in the water.” John Jacob Astor’s body was found floating with arms outstretched, his gold pocket watch dangling from its platinum chain. To the ship’s undertaker it looked as if Astor had just glanced at his watch before he took the plunge. It is often written that Astor’s body was found mangled and soot-covered and that he must therefore have been crushed when the forward funnel came down. Yet according to three eyewitnesses, Astor’s body was in good condition and soot-free, and like most of the other floating victims, he appeared to have died of hypothermia. On April 25 the body of the Buffalo architect Edward Kent was recovered. In the pocket of his gray overcoat was the silver flask and ivory miniature given to him by Helen Candee on the grand staircase, and these were later returned to her by Kent’s sister. Frank Millet’s body was found on the same day and identified by the initials F. D. M. on his gold watch. The next evening the Mackay-Bennett left for Halifax with 190 bodies on board, another 116 having been buried at sea. A second ship, the Minia, had arrived on the scene, but after a week’s search it retrieved only seventeen bodies, and two other ships would find only an additional five. The Mackay-Bennett landed in Halifax on April 30 to the tolling of church bells and flags flying at half-staff. Horse-drawn hearses took the bodies from the dock to a temporary morgue set up in a curling rink.

As Millet, Archie Butt, and Clarence Moore passed through the dining saloon that Thursday evening, a likely table to have received friendly greetings was the one occupied by Colonel Archibald Gracie IV and his two companions, Edward Austin Kent, a Buffalo architect, and a New York clubman named James Clinch Smith. The affable Gracie was the most outgoing of the three and had the polished manners of a man from an old and distinguished family. His great-grandfather, Archibald Gracie I, was a Scottish-born shipping magnate who in 1799 had built a large Federal-style home in Manhattan overlooking the East River that is now known as Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor of New York.

The Scriptures tell us rightly that input determines output — that our programming determines production.

When asked if he really believed that two men for whose salvation he had prayed for over fifty years would be converted, George Muller of Bristol replied, “Do you think God would have kept me praying all these years if He did not intend to save them?” Both men were converted, one shortly before, the other after Muller’s death.

Christian marriage vows are the inception of a lifelong practice of death, of giving over not only all you have, but all you are.

John Bunyan once said: “You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.

Just when we think we are the safest, when we feel no need to keep our guard up, to work on our inner integrity, to discipline ourselves for godliness — temptation will come!

Greek mythology tells of a beautiful youth who loved no one until the day he saw his own reflection in the water and fell in love with that reflection. He was so lovesick, he finally wasted away and died, and was turned into a flower that bears his name — Narcissus.

(Other helpful passages include Job 31:1, Proverbs 6:27, Mark 9:42ff., Ephesians 5:3-7, and 2 Timothy 2:22, some of which are commented upon below.)

At this moment [of lust] God . . . loses all reality. . . . Satan does not fill us with hatred of God, but with forgetfulness of God” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. (Psalm 90:2)

The importance of having our ears dug open comes to us from the lips of Jesus: “He who has an ear, let him hear . . .” (Revelation 2:7, 11, 17, 29; 3:6, 13, 22). We need to read God’s Word, but we must also pray that He will blast through our granite-block heads so we truly hear His Word.

We are anchored in the Father’s presence for eternity—and Jesus at his right hand perpetually intercedes for his Church.

Conversion meant a conscious turning away from the old way of life.

is heir to all the heavens and numberless worlds, but we are his treasures. The redeemed are worth more than the universe. We ought to be delirious with this truth.

Belief, the mental acceptance of a fact as true, will simply not bring rest to any soul. Acknowledging that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Savior of the world will not give us rest. Trust in him is what gives rest to our souls.

This tremendous lesson from the life of Moses teaches us that one can be regarded as hugely successful in the ministry and yet be a failure.

Little hearts, though safe and protected, never contribute anything. No one benefits from their shrunken sympathies and visions. On the other hand, hearts that have embraced the disciplines of ministry—though they are vulnerable—are also the hearts that possess the most joy and leave their heart prints on the world. Cultivate

You can never have a Christian mind without reading the Scriptures regularly because you cannot be profoundly influenced by that which you do not know.

So today, at the end of the twentieth century, we have a phenomenon unthinkable in any other century: churchless Christians. There is a vast herd of professed Christians who exist as nomadic hitchhikers without accountability, without discipline, without discipleship, living apart from the regular benefits of the ordinances.

Therefore, the way for the Christian to avoid spiritual collapse is to consider Christ and the opposition He faced from the likes of sinners like Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate. Consider how He faced them with confidence, meekness, and strength.

The natural tendency is to put giving off until you feel able to give. Such thinking keeps many from ever giving. A preacher came to see a farmer and asked him, “If you had $200, would you give $100 of it to the Lord?” “I would.” “If you had two cows, would you give one of them to the Lord?” “Sure.” “If you had two pigs, would you give one of them to the Lord?” The farmer said, “Now that isn’t fair! You know I have two pigs.

What things are weighing you down? The call to discipline demands that you throw it off. Are you man enough?

Men, Job’s covenant forbids a second look. It means treating all women with dignity — looking at them respectfully. If their dress or demeanor is distracting, look them in the eyes, and nowhere else, and get away as quickly as you can!