Quotes Tagged "faith"

There is a greater Christian faith than one which settles for the temporal happiness, and that is the augmentation of faith. The more faithful you become, the harder the obstacles get; but the harder the obstacles get, the tougher your spine grows; and the tougher your spine grows, the less dependent you are on man's approval. I came to know this about Christianity when valuing faith before comfort.

The cautious faith that never saws off a limb on which it is sitting, never learns that unattached limbs may find strange unaccountable ways of not falling.

Yes, she believed God loved her. But if this whole fiasco was His idea of love . . .

God is as real as a station wagon.

There is a beauty in paradox when it comes to talking about things of ultimate concern. Paradox works against our tendency to stay superficial in our faith, or to rest on easy answers or categorical thinking. It breaks apart our categories by showing the inadequacy of them and by pointing to a reality larger than us, the reality of gloria, of light, of beyond-the-beyond. I like to call it paradoxology—the glory of paradox, paradox-doxology—which takes us somewhere we wouldn’t be capable of going if we thought we had everything all wrapped up, if we thought we had attained full comprehension. The commitment to embracing the paradox and resisting the impulse to categorize people (ourselves included) is one of the ways we follow Jesus into that larger mysterious reality of light and love.

We are in God’s hands. We can’t come up with a surprise big enough or a sin vile enough to thwart His plan. If we allow Him to refine us we will inevitably end up free from the impurities that separate us from Him.

You were born into this life equipped to succeed. You are a part of God’s perfect plan. Yes, you. The plan would not be perfect if you were missing. Think about that. You matter more than you know.

God is merciful cant we all be on the right track of faith but just using different roads?

There’s faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there’s faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they’re not entirely certain they’re in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God’s mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence.

No human mind can fully grasp the gift of Christ’s atonement, the vastness and inclusiveness of the act—but in the end, it comes down to just you and Jesus. You’ve come, and He’s met you with open arms—and now it’s just between the two of you.

In that moment, I understand the way that the noblest yearning for duty and sacrifice can be mixed up with all that is savage and shameful, like in the Bible, where a just and merciful God tells you to kill everyone, kill the children, kill the livestock, kill John Polling, leave nothing alive to sully this pure and just world. Except when it's all done you find out that wasn't really God after all, just some politician, or maybe it was God, but he taps you on the shoulder and says, 'No, dude, that isn't what I meant,' and leaves you sitting in a Dairy Queen in Bothell with blood on your hands and no further orders...

In the desert, the only god is a well.

The cure for our modern maladies is dirt under the fingernails and the feel of thick grass between the toes. The cure for our listlessness is to be out within the invigorating wind. The cure for our uselessness is to take back up our stewardship; for it is not that there has been no work to be done, we simply have not been attending to it.

Bí ann nó as táimse ag triall Ort agus má tá cuirim geasa Ort mé a shábháil ón dream a deir gur fear fuar sa spéir Thú.

I make messes. God makes masterpieces. And the difference is found in surrendering what I think I know to the God who knows without having to think.

In the winter of the heart...we experience a wide gap between what we know of God and what we taste and see of God. Our theology says one thing - God is loving, faithful, righteous, bestowing wonders. But our experience says another - that he's aloof, angry, capricious, dealing bruises. And we feel deeply alone; even when we're with others, we're estranged from them. Sadness is a room we can't find the door out of. And worst of all, we feel the encroachment of death. Everything looks dead. We feel dead. Sometimes we wish we were dead. But Christ, the Man for All Seasons, meets us even here, in the depth of our wintertime. He waits with us. He prunes us. He breaks our self-dependency and deepens our God-dependency. He brings us into a fresh encounter with the God who raises the dead. And always, the Man for All Seasons leads us out of winter.

When you share your problems with man, you get man-sized solutions. When you share your problems with God, you get God-sized solutions.

The impossible is not the place where we ran out of possibilities. Rather, it’s the place where we ran out of faith.

If you don't know what to do with your life, you should start right where you're at... right now. Get involved in a local church. Start praying for people around you. Begin reading Scriptures and ask God to show you His purpose for your life. It may seem like a large task to begin, but just look at life as picking up one piece after another until you start to see something brand new.

God doesn't hate you for what you've done wrong, He loves you for what you're trying to do right.