Quotes Tagged "faith"

People are what matters to me the most, and if they need their religion to cope with their struggles of life, then I'll defend their right to faith with all the might in my veins, no matter how many intellectual scholars speak ill of me.

A setback is often a prerequisite to your success; not a life sentence.

Faith comes by hearing; the quality and originality of what you hear birth your future.

God is neither intimidated by the depth nor the height of your troubles; nor is He blind to them. He will show up in due time.

If I understand death as a temporary loss that is irrevocably swallowed up by the eternal existence within which it occurs, I suddenly realize that it is the death of something that enriches the life of everything.

Prayer is where I trade the rhetoric of men the for the promises of God. It is where I petition perfection instead of count on those who someone survived an election. It is to accept the incomprehensible invitation of God to have this weak voice of mine thunder down the halls of heaven and roll up to the throne of the God of all eternity so that as small as I am, I might have an audience with this “King of kings.” It is where my fatigue becomes a stage upon which God can unveil His strength in stunning fashion, and where my fear is obliterated by His courage. Prayer is where I rise above this tangled world and find myself enveloped by a world that I visit today, but will live in tomorrow. Prayer is utterly indispensable to this cringing existence, for unless I rise above it I will be consumed by the darkness of it. Prayer is this and does this and will always be this.

I don’t fight battles by penning words or crafting syntax designed to bring people to tears by liberating their hearts or calling out their souls. Nor do I fight them by sitting with untold thousands and granting them counsel in the darkness of their darkest hours. No. Rather, I fight them prone on my knees in morning’s darkness before the sun has roused a wounded world awake to feel its pain yet again. I fight them throughout the day as I “pray without ceasing” because troubles befall us without ceasing. I fight them by praying for the impossible in lives devastated beyond redemption, for rogue nations that spread destruction as though destroying life was the answer to life, for the weak who stand teetering precariously on some emotional or relational or financial abyss, and for an impossible number of situations that everyone else has deemed as impossible. I fight in prayer. And despite the massive weaponry available to mankind, I am utterly convinced that a single man on his knees in humble petition before God exceeds the armament of all the world’s nations combined. This is what I believe. And therefore, this is how I fight.

How do I tell you what prayer is? It is everything that I need every time I kneel in the practice of it. It shakes the infinite alive and sets its armies afoot in defense of me. It will never run aground or find itself drowning in the waters of the adversity that I bring to it. Nothing it faces is insurmountable, for to think that such an adversary exists is to run a fool’s errand. It will shield me in its advance, it will beckon me to anticipate the miracles that it is about to wield, and in the midst of it all it calms me as it whispers, “Be still and know that I am God.” And because of these reasons and a million more, I find prayer the single greatest place that I could ever imagine being.

I am convinced beyond words to convey that prayer is infinitely more than the mindless ranting of some poor, delusional soul talking to some imaginary friend in some imaginary place. Oh, to the contrary. Prayer is the manifest pleading of a soul worn raw that, by the simple act of prayer, unleashes untold forces that we can’t imagine that surge in a descent so massive and so inconceivably powerful that the ground of everything before them shakes. And in this descent lives are changed beyond recognition, nations are transformed beyond comprehension, and history is brought to its knees in the face of a God who says “be healed.” That, my friend, is nothing of a delusional soul or imaginary friend or any other such nonsense.

I cannot begin to tell you how many times I have come to prayer broken far beyond any conceivable hope of repair. I have likewise come without anywhere to turn simply because, much like myself, everything around me lies broken beyond repair. And I cannot tell you how many times God has taken that which is broken and has used it to do what could never have done should any of that had been whole.

Prayer penetrates the underside of heaven and sends the full force of an invisible realm hurdling against the adversaries that are too naïve to understand what’s about to descend upon them.

Should all the hoards of mankind assemble as one and bring the full force of their numbers against us, we must remember that one man standing alone with God remains an immovable majority.

To end my life having exhausted the whole of it in the pursuit of worldly things means that I will die holding no things. But to exhaust the whole of it in the pursuit of God means that I will die holding all things. And the difference between the two is everything.

أهذا ما تريده أن أخسر الدنيا والآخرة؟ ...جحيم الدنيا بين نار الصبر، ونار الندم علي الذنب، وجحيم الآخرة في جهنم التى وعدت العصاه أمثالي بها.

هل أنا من أخلق دراما حياتى أم أنت ؟! أجبنى يا الله ...أجبنى ولو بعلامة بإشارة ..أعلم أن العلامات، والإشارات إنما تختص بها أولياءك الصالحين...لكنى أستحلفك بذاتك العلّية، وبقدوس أسمائك السماوية، وبكل ما فتحت، وتفتح به عليّ. أن تفتح يا إلهى عليّ بخيرك الوفير، وتصطفينى مع عبادك الأبرار، وتعاملني معاملة الأخيار الأطهار. أعلم أنى لست منهم، لكنها فضائل رحمتك، وفيوض عظيم قدرتك عليّ يا الله...يا الله أرنى علامة تفتح بها عليّ ، لأعلم ما هو عليّ عصى، لأرى حقيقة ما في قلبي وأراك ...لن أسالك كما سألك موسي من قبل ..بأن أراك رؤية العين ، لكنى أستحلفك بك أن أراك رؤية القلب.

My faith is in the unknown, in all that we do not understand by reason; I believe that what is beyond our comprehension is a simple fact in other dimensions, and that in the realm of the unknown there is an infinite power for good.

Regrets and mistakes help us identify areas of growth. They are not meant to be dwelled on. Do not let them undermine your potential.

Great peace have those who love your law, and nothing can make them stumble (Psalm 119:165).

And what's God if not a puppeteer...one who makes us dance...one who craves and demands attention?

We have cast surrender as weak. However, if surrender to God makes us everything we could never be on our own, then weakness would, in fact, be the unwillingness to surrender.