Quotes from Philip Gulley

Truth doesn't need elaboration or embellishment; it can stand on its own two legs. All the adornment in the world doesn't make the truth any more true.

Sometimes we come to gratitude too late. It's only after blessing has passed on that we realize what we had.

Community is a beautiful thing; sometimes it even heals us and makes us better than we would otherwise be.

In this unsettled world, it is good to have this steadiness—the Christmas Eve service, the peal of the bell, the star atop the Peacocks' silo, the saints burdened with concern. There is a holiness to memory, a sense of God's presence in these mangers of the mind. Which might explain why it is that the occasions that change the least are often the very occasions that change us the most.

I don't want to spend this last half [of life] trying to recapture the first. I want to stretch and grow and do bold things ... and question what I've been taught and generally alarm people with my broadmindedness.

Thus are the changes wrought in a man's life—that courage is treasured more than comfort and, in that choice, victory is gained.

This is how foreign grace was to her, that when she heard it she mistook it for heresy. There are some people, I am sorry to say, who wouldn't recognize grace if it stood at their door wearing a name tag.

Many false claims are made about God. They exact a heavy toll on people who believe every utterance from the pulpit must surely be the gospel truth.

I believe God loves everyone.

A New World. A world where God has set up housekeeping, where God will live right with us, and we with Him. He'll wipe the tears from our eyes, and death will die. No more crying, no more sorrow, no more pain, no more.

We don't need to be beautiful for Christ to take us in. He is equally at home when we're broken-down and dirty.

Every effort to safeguard what is considered truth inevitably leads to the crippling of truth, for the very act of enshrining a belief and treating it as settled truth and infallible doctrine is to declare that the search for truth has concluded. Any religion with a regard for truth must resist every effort to bring its search for truth to an end. This includes the formation of creeds, which by their nature are presented as conclusive and indisputable.

They said I lacked ambition, which wasn't true. They confused contentment for stagnation, a common mistake.

Life, not lectures, inspires us to change.

People did not come to God through Jesus as much as they saw the priorities of God in Jesus.

I had met my wife in college. Her name was Barbara, and she was the first woman besides my mother to show the faintest interest in me. It took six years to persuade her to marry me.

Both his parents had died of heart problems, which he feared would happen to him, so he'd begun to jog and was hit by a truck.

For a minister, that was pretty inconsiderate of him to go and get killed during Lent," she said.

There'll be times," Pastor Taylor had told Sam in a quiet, hesitant voice, "when your flock will minister to you. Dark nights of the soul when it feels you've lost your way. And you have to let them. Sam, you have to let them help you.

Dr. Neely's theory is that if you're not willing to get poked with a needle, then you're probably not sick enough to see a doctor.

When I lifted up the Bible as my ultimate authority, I made my leather-bound, gold-engraved Bible into a paper calf.

But if religion is more than the attainment of power and privilege, if it is the doorway into beauty and mystery and meaning, then not only is divinity unnecessary but it is an impediment, for it implies that enlightenment is beyond the reach of mortals.

But we have to get our thrills somewhere. Some men have a weakness for fast women. I have a soft spot for eighty-year-old heretics who buy me pancakes and root beer.

The testimony of the Bible is clear. The God of Jesus, of Peter and of Paul, and of Abraham and Jacob is a living God. He calls himself "I AM," not "I WAS." Scripture isn't a brittle and crumbling letter from a God long silent. The Bible proclaims a God of visions, fresh words, and new revelations. To believe the Bible is to believe in such a God.