Anne Graham Lotz

Sometimes when you're suffering really intensely, you can't pray for yourself.

One misconception is that if we follow God in the life of faith, and that means obedience - that we read His Word, we're obedient, we pray, we go to church, we do the right things - that somehow His blessing means we're going to be okay.

I think some people who say they're not Christians can behave in a more godly fashion than people who call themselves Christians.

When Jesus says you must leave your family to follow Him, he doesn't necessarily mean physically. He means leave your dependence on them, make an emotional break with them.

When life is good and we have no problems, we can almost let ourselves believe we have no need for God. But in my experience, sometimes the richest blessings come through pain and hard things.

Abraham is such a fascinating figure. Three world religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - all claim him as a patriarch. He was raised in a religious home. And yet he rejected religion in order to pursue a personal relationship with God.

There is nothing at all that God won't forgive.

It has been religious people, often within the organized church, who have been the most critical of and even hostile to my relationship with God.

Death is a door. When we close our eyes in this life, we will open our eyes to Jesus.

Every time I see my brother, I just praise God for God's grace in his life. Because if God can change Franklin from a prodigal into a man of God, he can do it for anybody.

Some people who suffer run away from God, and I know the tendency, but instead I just run to Him.

When the storms of life come, if they come to me personally, to my family or to the world, I want to be strong enough to stand and be a strength to somebody else, be shelter for somebody else.

I read God's word when I am not suffering. And then I don't have to all of a sudden establish this habit when I am hurting.

My life's goal is not to write books; my life's goal is to know God better today. The neat thing about a goal like that is you can achieve it. Faith is constant; it's a relationship.

I think of religion as man's attempt to reach God, and you can't do that.

Even as a teenager, I felt that for whatever reason that we were living very close to the end of human history. And now at my age I believe that with almost an increasing certainty.

My hope is that this life is not all there is. This life is like preparation for what is coming next, and what is coming next is something so glorious that the Bible says minds can't conceive it, eye has never seen, your imagination could never even enter into all that God is preparing for those who love him.

I felt that one of the things God impressed on me was that I needed to start a nonprofit corporation, so that any money that came my way, whether it was an honorarium, a book sale or a gift, would go into a nonprofit ministry.

Around 1998, I went through lots of pressures and struggles. My children got married within eight months of each other, my son was diagnosed with cancer and went through major surgery and radiation, my mother had five life-threatening hospitalizations where I stayed with her, my husband's dental office burned to the ground.

I don't take any money from my ministry. I'm not on salary. My husband supports me.

I get up earlier than my husband and I intentionally spend time in prayer and Bible reading just to focus myself for the day, because the days get crazy.

If I can center down and strengthen the core of who I am, and the core of who I am is my relationship with God, then that helps me maintain peace deep down. If I can maintain a healthy spiritual core, I think that's enormous for helping the stress.

If God can bring blessing from the broken body of Jesus and glory from something that's obscene as the cross, He can bring blessing from my problems and my pain and my unanswered prayer.

In the Bible, ordination - I don't see that in the Scripture. In the Bible, it's whether you're filled with the Holy Spirit, whether you're anointed by God, whether you're called by God, whether you're obedient to Him. I want to be those things, but I don't see any purpose for me in being ordained.

I believe that God has a plan and purpose not only for the human race, but for my individual life.