"Must you go to China? How much nicer it would be to stay here and serve the Lord at home!" She made it plain at last that she would not go to China." - J. Hudson Taylor's new ex-girlfriend
"You can do something other than working with God in His purpose, but it will always be something lesser, and you couldn't come up with something better." - Steve Hawthorne
"I have seen, at different times, the smoke of a thousand villages - villages whose people are without Christ, without God, and without hope in the world." - Robert Moffat
"The command has been to "go," but we have stayed - in body, gifts, prayer and influence. He has asked us to be witnesses unto the uttermost parts of the earth... but 99% of Christians have kept puttering around in the homeland." - Robert Savage
"While vast continents are shrouded in darkness... the burden of proof lies upon you to show that the circumstances in which God has placed you were meant by God to keep you out of the foreign mission field." - Ion Keith-Falconer
"I wasn't God's first choice for what I've done for China... I don't know who it was... It must have been a man... a well-educated man. I don't know what happened. Perhapshe died. Perhaps he wasn't willing... and God looked down... and saw Gladys Aylward... And God said - "Well, she's willing." - Gladys Aylward
"Brother, if you would enter that Province, you must go forward on your knees." - J. Hudson Taylor
"The man... looking at him with a smile that only half concealed his contempt, inquired, "Now Mr. Morrison do you really expect that you will make an impression on the idolatry of the Chinese Empire?" "No sir," said Morrison, "but I expect that God will." - Robert Morrison
"Here am I. Send me." - Isaiah
"And people who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives... and when the bubble has burst they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted." - Nate Saint
"Jehovah Witnesses don't believe in hell and neither do most Christians" - Leonard Ravenhill
"Had I cared for the comments of people, I should never have been a missionary." - C.T. Studd
"Young man, sit down: when God pleases to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid or mine." - said to a young William Carey
"Oh, that I had a thousand lives, and a thousand bodies! All of them should be devoted to no other employment but to preach Christ to these degraded, despised, yet beloved mortals." - Robert Moffat
"We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God." - John Stott
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." - Jim Elliot
"A tiny group of believers who have the gospel keep mumbling it over and over to themselves. Meanwhile, millions who have never heard it once fall into the flames of eternal hell without ever hearing the salvation story." - K.P. Yohannan
"I have but one passion - it is He, it is He alone. The world is the field and the field is the world; and henceforth that country shall be my home where I can be most used in winning souls for Christ." - Count Zinzindorf
"God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supplies." - J. Hudson Taylor
"He must increase, but I must decrease." - John the Baptist
"If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him." - C.T. Studd
"The greatest missionary is the Bible in the mother tongue. It needs no furlough and is never considered a foreigner." - William Cameron Townsend
"Prepare for the worst, expect the best, and take what comes." - Robert E. Speer
"The saddest thing one meets is a nominal Christian. I had not seen it in Japan where missions is younger. The church here is a "field full of wheat and tares." - Amy Carmichael
"I used to think that prayer should have the first place and teaching the second. I now feel it would be truer to give prayer the first, second and third places and teaching the fourth." - James O. Fraser
"It is just as proper, maybe even more so, to say Christ's global cause has a Church as to say Christ's Church has a global cause." - David Bryant
"If you are sick, fast and pray; if the language is hard to learn, fast and pray; if the people will not hear you, fast and pray, if you have nothing to eat, fast and pray." - Frederick Franson
"What are we here for, to have a good time with Christians or to save sinners?" - Malla Moe
"I tell you, brethren, if mercies and if judgments do not convert you, God has no other arrows in His quiver." - Robert Murray Mc'Cheyne
"It's amazing what can be accomplished if you don't worry about who gets the credit." - Clarence W. Jones
"Two distinguishing marks of the early church were: 1) Poverty 2) Power." - T.J. Bach
"Do not think me mad. It is not to make money that I believe a Christian should live. The noblest thing a man can do is, just humbly to receive, and then go amongst others and give." - David Livingstone
"From my many years' experience I can unhesitatingly say that the cross bears those who bear the cross." - Sadhu Sundar Singh
"I pray that no missionary will ever be as lonely as I have been." - Lottie Moon
"All my friends are but one, but He is all sufficient." - William Carey
"How little chance the Holy Ghost has nowadays. The churches and missionary societies have so bound him in red tape that they practically ask Him to sit in a corner while they do the work themselves." - C.T. Studd
"I have always believed that the Good Samaritan went across the road to the wounded man just because he wanted to." - Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
"The more obstacles you have, the more opportunities there are for God to do something." - Clarence W. Jones
"Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God." - William Carey
"God's part is to put forth power; our part is to put forth faith." - Andrew A. Bonar
"All the resources of the Godhead are at our disposal!" - Jonathan Goforth
"I feel now, that Arabia could easily be evangelized within the next thirty years if it were not for the wicked selfishness of Christians." -Samuel Zwemer
"The Indian is making an amazing discovery, namely that Christianity and Jesus are not the same - that they may have Jesus without the system that has been built up around Him in the West." - E. Stanley Jones
"This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come." - Jesus
"All roads lead to the judgment seat of Christ." - Keith Green
"Obedience to the call of Christ nearly always costs everything to two people- the one who is called, and the one who loves that one." - Oswald Chambers
"Christians don't tell lies they just go to church and sing them" - A.W. Tozer
"I have said that there is nothing in the world or the Church, except it's disobedience, to render the evangelization of the world in this generation an impossibility." - Robert Speer
"I will lay my bones by the Ganges that India might know there is one who cares." - Alexander Duff
"Today Christians spend more money on dog food then missions" - Leonard Ravenhill
"It will not do to say that you have no special call togo to China. With these facts before you and with the command of the Lord Jesus to go and preach the gospel to every creature, you need rather to ascertain whether you have a special call to stay at home." - J. Hudson Taylor
"We talk of the second coming, half the world has never heard of the first." - Oswald J. Smith
"God cannot lead you on the basis of facts that you do not know." - David Bryant
"And thus I aspire to preach the gospel, not where Christ was already named so that I would not build on another man's foundation." - Paul
"Why do we insist on building the largest and most impressive structures in our city when people on the other side of town are hungry, jobless and worshipping in storefronts?" - K.P. Yohannan
"If every Christian is already considered a missionary, then all can stay put where they are, and nobody needs to get up and go anywhere to preach the gospel. But if our only concern is to witness where we are, how will people in unevangelized areas ever hear the gospel? The present uneven distribution of Christians and opportunities to hear the gospel of Christ will continue on unchanged." - C. Gordon Olson
"I spent twenty years of my life trying to recruit people out of local churches and into missions structures so that they could be involved in fulfilling God's global mission. Now I have another idea. Let's take God's global mission and put it right in the middle of the local church!" - George Miley
"God provides the men and women needed for each generation." -Mildred Cable
"Oh dear, I couldn't say that my church is alive and I wouldn't want to call it dead. I guess it's just walking in its sleep!" - Church member
"When he landed in 1848 there were no Christians here; when he left in 1872 there were no heathen." - said of John Geddie
"I am ready to burn out for God. I am ready to endure any hardship, if by any means I might save some. The longing of my heart is to make known my glorious Redeemer to those who have never heard." -William Burns
"At the moment I put the bread and wine into those dark hands, once stained with the blood of cannibalism, now stretched out to receive and partake theemblems and seals of the Redeemer's love, I had a foretaste of the joy of glory that well nigh broke my heart to pieces. I shall never taste a deeper bliss, till I gaze on the glorified face of Jesus himself." - John G. Paton
"Save others, snatching them out of the fire." - Jude
"The evangelization of the world in this generation." - Student Volunteer Movement Motto
"Other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring." - Jesus
"Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't." - John Piper
"His authority on earth allows us to dare to go to all the nations. His authority in heaven gives us our only hope of success. And His presence with us leaves us no other choice." - John Stott
"Today five out of six non-Christians in our world have no hope unless missionaries come to them and plant the church among them." - David Bryant
"Tell the students to give up their small ambitions and come eastward to preach the gospel of Christ." - Francis Xavier
"Christ for the students of the world, and the students of the world for Christ." - Luther Wishard
"We who have Christ's eternal life need to throw away our own lives." - George Verwer
"Some wish to live within the sound of a chapel bell, I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of Hell." - C.T. Studd
"When I get to China, I will have no claim on any one for anything. My claim will be alone in God and I must learn before I leave England to move men through God by prayer alone." - J. Hudson Taylor
"God has huge plans for the world today! He is not content to merely establish a handful of struggling churches among each tongue, tribe and nation. Even now He is preparing and empowering His Church to carry the seeds of revival to the uttermost ends of the earth." - David Smithers
"The mark of a great church is not its seating capacity, but its sending capacity." - Mike Stachura
"Answering a student's question, 'Will the heathen who have not heard the Gospel be saved?' thus, 'It is more a question with me whether we, who have the Gospel and fail to give it to those who have not, can be saved.'" - C.H. Spurgeon.
Twenty year-old John R. Mott walked in late to the meeting at Cornell while J.K. Studd was quoting,
"Young man, are you seeking great things for yourself? Seek them not! Seek first the Kingdom of God!" He couldn't sleep all night. He finally got up and had the courage to meet with Studd. He later said that the meeting with Studd was the "decisive hour of his life". He went on to become the greatest missions mobilizer in world history.
"There is something wonderfully misleading, full of hallucination and delusion in this business of missionary calls. With many of us it is not a missionary call at all that we are looking for; it is a shove. There are a great many of us who would never hear a call if it came." - Robert Speer
"I have found that there are three stages in every great work of God; first, it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done." - J. Hudson Taylor
"I love to live on the brink of eternity." - David Brainerd
"The greatest tragedy to befall a person is to have sight but lack vision." - Helen Keller
"'Not called!' did you say? 'Not heard the call,' I think you should say. Put your ear down to the Bible, and hearhim bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father's house and bid their brothers and sisters, and servants and masters not to come there. And then look Christ in the face, whose mercy you have professed to obey, and tell him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish his mercy to the world." - William Booth
"Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you are alive, it isn't." - Richard Bach
"If God has fit you to be a missionary, I would not have you shrivel down to be a king." - Charles H. Spurgeon
"The world is my parish." - John Wesley
"Why doesn't your God speak my language?" - Guatemalan Indian to Cam Townsend, founder Wycliffe Bible Translators
"I am willing to go anywhere, at anytime, to do anything for Jesus." - Luther Wishard
"The 3.5 billion unreached people on earth would form a single file line that would stretch around the equator 25 times! Can you picture 25 lines of Christless people, trampling endlessly toward hell? Let that vision stay with you day and night." - Larry Stockstill
"God does not have to come and tell me what I must do for Him, He brings me into a relationship with Himself where I hear His call and understand what He wants me to do, and I do it out of sheer love to Him... When people say they have had a call to foreign service, or to any particular sphere of work, they mean that their relationship to God has enabled them to realize what they can do for God." - Oswald Chambers
"A little prayer, little power; no prayer, no power." - A Chinese Christian motto
"When God's finger points, God's hand will open the door." -Clarence Jones
"I will open Africa to the gospel or die trying." - Rowland Bingham
"None but women can reach Muslim Women... So we have a solemn duty in this matter that we cannot shift. The blood of souls is on our skirts, and God will demand them at our hands." - Missionary wife from the Middle East
"The church that does not evangelize will fossilize." -Oswald J. Smith
"As long as there are millions destitute of the word of God and the knowledge of Jesus Christ, it will be impossible for me to devote my time and energy to those who have both." - J.L. Ewen
"If sinners be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies. And if they perish, let them perish with our arms about their knees, imploring them to stay. If hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let not one go there unwarned and unprayed for." - Charles Spurgeon
"We have a God who delights in impossibilities." - Andrew Murray
"Why do you need a voice when you have a verse." -Jim Elliot
"The history of missions is the history of answered prayer. From Pentecost to the Haystack meeting in New England and from the days when Robert Morrison landed in China to the martyrdom of John and Betty Stam, prayer has been the source of power and the secret of spiritual triumph." -Samuel Zwemer
--Author unknown
contributed by Bev Borbe, former General Nazarene Missions International President