Andy Stanley Quotes

#1. None of us plan
or intend
to get into trouble. The problem is, we don't plan not to.

Andy Stanley

#2. Be who you are. But be the very best communicator you can possibly be. To do that you must be willing to sacrifice what's comfortable-what has become part of your style-for the sake of what is effective.

Andy Stanley

#3. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. (EPHESIANS 5:21)

Andy Stanley

#4. God often showcases his power on the stage of human weakness.

Andy Stanley

#5. It is amazing what can be accomplished when we wait on God to lead us out. It is equally amazing the mess we can make of things when we charge out on our own.

Andy Stanley

#6. The primary reason we do too much is that we have never taken the time to discover that portion of what we do that makes the biggest difference.

Andy Stanley

#7. The leader who refuses to move until the fear is gone will never move. Consequently, he will never lead.

Andy Stanley

#8. It takes a habit to break a habit. You can pray every day for a generous heart, but until you start acting in that direction, nothing's going to change.

Andy Stanley

#9. Uncertainty is not an indication of poor leadership; it underscores the need for leadership.

Andy Stanley

#10. Before I draw people's attention to a solution, I want to make sure they are emotionally engaged with the problem. If the text answers a question, I dare not go there until everyone in the audience really wants to know the answer.

Andy Stanley

#11. Intervention giving is emotional and the results are measurable.

Andy Stanley

#12. Who are you and what breaks your heart?

Andy Stanley

#13. No matter how much money we have or make, we will probably never consider ourselves rich. The biggest challenge facing rich people is that they've lost they're ability to recognize that they're rich.

Andy Stanley

#14. Devoting a little of yourself to everything means committing a great deal of yourself to nothing.

Andy Stanley

#15. Nothing has stolen more dreams, dashed more hopes, broken up more families, and messed up more people psychologically than our propensity to disregard God's commands regarding sexual purity.

Andy Stanley

#16. Leadership is all about taking people on a journey. The challenge is that most of the time, we are asking people to follow us to places we ourselves have never been.

Andy Stanley

#17. The health of your marriage tomorrow will be determined by the decisions you make today.

Andy Stanley

#18. Initially, your vision will exceed your competency.

Andy Stanley

#19. How do you recruit and keep volunteers? Part of the answer is that we clarify the win. Countless individuals quit working in churches every year

Andy Stanley

#20. It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God

Andy Stanley

#21. What God originates, God orchestrates.

Andy Stanley

#22. Your beliefs shape your attitudes!

Andy Stanley

#23. According to Sports Illustrated, an amazing 78 percent of NFL players find themselves bankrupt or financially stressed within two years of retirement. And 60 percent of NBA players are broke within five years of walking off the court.

Andy Stanley

#24. Is Christianity fair? It is certainly not fair to God. Christians believe that God sent His Son to die for your sins and mine. Fairness would demand that we die for our own sins.

Andy Stanley

#25. Broken-hearted leaders change things that go beyond their generation.

Andy Stanley

#26. God doesn't want to take your money. He just doesn't want your money to take you.

Andy Stanley

#27. Leaders, if you allow wonder to shut down in you, you will shut it down in everyone around you.

Andy Stanley

#28. Vions are born in the soul of a man or woman who is consumed with the tension between what is and what could be.

Andy Stanley

#29. If you are a local church or non-profit, you live and die with volunteers.

Andy Stanley

#30. There is an appropriate way to use your story, not as an excuse but as a testimony to God's ability to free you from the past.

Andy Stanley

#31. One of the primary reasons we don't seek counsel from the wise people around us is that we already know what we are going to hear
and we just don't want to hear it.

Andy Stanley

#32. Whenever a leader tries to build job security by making himself indispensable to the organization, he in fact does the organization a disservice. Job security is too often based on someone's insecurity.

Andy Stanley

#33. Giving is the way God chooses to change our hearts. As your heart changes, your attitude and feelings will follow suit. God loves a cheerful giver, but he'll put your money to good use whether you're cheerful or not. My advice: Give until you get cheerful. As I've said, our giving must impact our

Andy Stanley

#34. The great challenge is how to marry creativity with discipline so that discipline amplifies creativity without destroying it.

Andy Stanley

#35. T-shirts create a sense of "We". Food says, "We don't mind spending money on you."

Andy Stanley

#36. Vision is a clear mental picture of what could be, fueled by the conviction that it should be.

Andy Stanley

#37. Preaching is not talking to people about the Bible; it is talking to people about themselves from the Bible.

Andy Stanley

#38. What you fear most will determine whether you merely save for the future or give for the future.

Andy Stanley

#39. Serving people we don't see eye to eye with is the essence of Christianity. Jesus died for a world with which he didn't see eye to eye. If a bakery doesn't want to sell its products to a gay couple, it's their business. Literally. But leave Jesus out of it.

Andy Stanley

#40. Leaders fix things that are broken.

Andy Stanley

#41. It's deceiving but true that we rarely see any immediate consequences for neglecting a single installment of time in any arena of life. But if neglect becomes your pattern, you will eventually bump up against our third principle: 3. Neglect has a cumulative effect. You

Andy Stanley

#42. If we were able to rewrite the script for the reputation of Christianity, I think we would put the emphasis on developing relationships with non-believers, serving them, loving them, and making them feel accepted, only then would we earn the right to share the gospel.

Andy Stanley

#43. Preachers' kids who gravitate toward ministry are commodities. I hire all I can. We see church differently than everybody else.

Andy Stanley

#44. Pitchers don't need to hit well; they need to pitch well. Every step you create needs to do what it does best and nothing more. Focus allows you to pursue excellence, to zero in on the target. You can ruin a great pitcher by trying to make a hitter out of him, and you can ruin a great church ...

Andy Stanley

#45. Here's a question every angry man and woman needs to consider: How long are you going to allow people you don't even like - people who are no longer in your life, maybe even people who aren't even alive anymore - to control your life? How long?

Andy Stanley

#46. What is this generation of students worth? It's worth everything.

Andy Stanley

#47. That would hurt the one I love the most

Andy Stanley

#48. As believers, we all have the responsibility to leverage our wealth for kingdom purposes.

Andy Stanley

#49. While nobody plans to mess up his life, the problem is that few of us plan not to.

Andy Stanley

#50. Leadership is about uncertainty. Deal with it

Andy Stanley

#51. This is why we give up on things that break our heart because it requires change.

Andy Stanley

#52. Rebellion never goes without consequences.

Andy Stanley

#53. One of the most difficult tasks of visioneering is distinguishing between good ideas and God ideas.

Andy Stanley

#54. You won't take risk without courage.

Andy Stanley

#55. If you're a Christian you can't have an "I'm better than" attitude toward anyone because everybody is somebody for whom Jesus died.

Andy Stanley

#56. It's OK to offend people with the Gospel, but, good grief- let's don't offend them with something else.

Andy Stanley

#57. The greatest motivator of change is a crystal-clear vision of what the future should look like.

Andy Stanley

#58. The insecure leader will interpret critical thinking as critiscism.

Andy Stanley

#59. We always have more ideas than we can fund.

Andy Stanley

#60. The roots of envy always run deeper and wider than the relationship in which it surfaces. In

Andy Stanley

#61. The value of a life is always measured by how much of it is given away.

Andy Stanley

#62. When you start thinking you're a big shot, you wash more feet.

Andy Stanley

#63. Are you the person the person you're looking for is looking for?

Andy Stanley

#64. Yes, God uses the uneducated to confound the wise. But that doesn't make ignorance a virtue.

Andy Stanley

#65. If there is a perceived difference between what you expect from others and what you expect from yourself, it will eventually erode your influence.

Andy Stanley

#66. What would bring about a revival of epic proportion?

Andy Stanley

#67. Uncertainty is a permanent part of the leadership landscape. It never goes away.

Andy Stanley

#68. Everything now will prepare you for the next step. Don't run from adversity; lean into it with all your heart and God will make you a leader worth following.

Andy Stanley

#69. If we all got kicked off the staff and the board, and an outside group (a group of leaders who were fearlessly committed to the mission of this church) took our place, what changes would they introduce?68 What's the first thing they would do? Who would they replace? What would they refuse to fund?

Andy Stanley

#70. If you devote yourself to more than yourself ... you will have more than yourself to show for yourself.

Andy Stanley

#71. Any fear associated with giving to God's kingdom is irrational. It's on par with a farmer who, out of fear of losing his seed, refuses to plant his fields.

Andy Stanley

#72. Dreamers dream about things being different. Visionaries envision themselves making a difference. Dreamers think about how nice it would be for something to be done. Visionaries look for an opportunity to do something.

Andy Stanley

#73. The best way to know if someone is prepared to commit is to examine his or her prior commitments. If you want to know how someone will behave tomorrow, take a look at what he or she did yesterday.

Andy Stanley

#74. Your character is who you really are.

Andy Stanley

#75. Preaching for life changes requires far less information and more application. Less explanation and more inspiration.

Andy Stanley

#76. Leaders are made one response at a time.

Andy Stanley

#77. The truth is that church by its nature is a very general concept and most people are not looking for a church; otherwise, churches would be full of visitors every week. What people are looking for is something that works for them as individuals. And that is something specific, not general.

Andy Stanley

#78. You have no idea the numbers of people that God may want to influence through you

Andy Stanley

#79. He best strategy for giving is a two-fold approach: a basic plan combined with a willingness to consider spontaneous giving when unique opportunities arise.

Andy Stanley

#80. There's a monumental difference in believing in God and believing God.

Andy Stanley

#81. It is when our hearts are stirred that we become most aware of what they contain.

Andy Stanley

#82. Jesus did not predict a place. Jesus predicted a people.

Andy Stanley

#83. If fear causes you to retreat from your dreams, you will never give the world anything new.

Andy Stanley

#84. Prudent people look as far down the road as possible when making decisions.

Andy Stanley

#85. Do you know why people are prone to make such foolish moral decisions? Because something always whispers to us that our situations are unique: Nobody has ever felt this way before.

Andy Stanley

#86. Often, stepping outside your comfort zone is not careless irresponsibility, but a necessary act of obedience.

Andy Stanley

#87. Jesus never allowed His theology to get in the way of His ministry.

Andy Stanley

#88. Direction, not intention determines your destination.

Andy Stanley

#89. Preaching on Sunday mornings is such a simple thing, and by complicating it, I think we all do ourselves and the audience a disservice. It is very simple. Here is the model: Make people feel like they need an answer to a question.

Andy Stanley

#90. Greed is not a financial issue. It's a heart issue.

Andy Stanley

#91. Guilt rarely results in positive behavior. But gratitude? Great things flow from a heart of gratitude.

Andy Stanley

#92. One never accomplishes the will of God by breaking the law of God, violating the principles of God, or ignoring the wisdom of God.

Andy Stanley

#93. If you're the only hot dog stand in town, you're hot dogs don't have to be good.

Andy Stanley

#94. A fool is a person who knows the difference between right and wrong, and chooses to do wrong.

Andy Stanley

#95. Fixing things requires change and change always creates conflict. But that is why you are a leader.

Andy Stanley

#96. As a believer just because you gain more fame or authority doesn't mean anything, this means you have more feet to wash

Andy Stanley

#97. If a teenage guy tends to overreact when he fails, there is a pretty good chance he thinks his significance is based on success.

Andy Stanley

#98. Fire in the fireplace is a wonderful thing. Fire on the carpet has the potential to burn down your house. Sex is like fire. In the right context, it is an awesome thing. But once it is outside the context it was designed for, sex can burn your life and relationships to the ground.

Andy Stanley

#99. What does it say about us that we are rarely perplexed by the good things that come our way, only the bad?

Andy Stanley

#100. People without clear vision are easily distracted, have a tendency to drift from one idea to another and often make foolish decisions that rob them of their dreams.

Andy Stanley