Quotes from Philip Gulley

The more I work on loving Jesus, the easier it becomes to love my family. Maybe it's really a matter of putting first things first. When we love the way of Jesus first, we're then sufficiently equipped to love our families.

One thing my experience has showed me is that spiritually alive people tend to be insatiably curious about the Divine Presence, refuse to settle for cliché-heavy religion, and feel little obligation to believe something because they are told they must.

Avoid those persons who claim always to have believed the same thing and demand you do the same. What they are really saying is that they have refused to permit their encounters with God to reshape their lives.

Instead, we sit in a booth at the Coffee Cup and drink fresh coffee from mugs that have our names printed on the bottom and that hang on the wall next to the front door when we're not there. We walk in, the bell over the door tinkles, Vinny greets us by name, and we pluck our mugs from the rack and head to our booth

the moment we dismiss someone else's beliefs while championing our own is the moment our conversation ends and our growth stops.

Here's a good test to know whether or not truth-telling springs from love. Truth will not only pain those who hear it; it will pain those who speak it. If we don't love someone, it won't hurt at all to speak truth. We'll tell them what we think with no regard for their feelings. If

Susan admitted the churches she had grown up in were heavy on hell and damnation and light on grace. They claimed to be "saved by grace" but then carefully outlined a very specific set of beliefs one had to accept in order to be a Christian. They had emphasized law over love. Nearly every sermon she heard growing up had warned of God's wrath. She'd been taught to fear God rather than be awed by his grace.

I believe there is no One True Church, no One True Faith, no single path to God. There are only compassion and grace, and where they are found, God is present, yearning to know and be known.

There is a certain transcendent joy in creating a thing of beauty. But even more fulfilling is to become a being of beauty.

That was the problem with religion. You no sooner made up your mind about something than you had to change it.

Our efforts to unite God and country, to pretend as if their objectives and characters are one, is to create a tribal god, who cares only for its own and no one else. It is the god of limited love, who endorses massacres, holocausts, and injustice of every sort, so long as those tyrannies are directed against the other.

I believe God will save every person.

Legacies are hard to come by, after all. And if you have one going, you ought to do what you can to keep it alive.

God is love. When people claim to speak for God, there should be love in their words.

What does it say about us when our intimacy is an embarrassment and our hostility is normalized?

it seems to me that the merit of any belief can be judged by the lengths people go to defend it. Poor, incomprehensible beliefs demand rigorous support. Defying reason and experience, they require the muscle of state and religion to maintain. Conversely, when a belief is so observably and obviously true, when it resonates with our experience, when it transcends cultures and eras, it requires no defense.

It's much simpler to wear the right clothes, eat the right food, and wear the right hairstyle than it is to love mercy and do justice. No wonder so many people have reduced religion to these simple, attainable standards.

some lesssons couldn't be taught, only learned.

Write letters to your grandmother. She will love it. And leave you money in her will.

When we are honest, we admit how agreeable it can feel to be singled out for favored treatment. The biggest barrier to equality for all is that inequality for some feels good.

We just never know. We think we do. We think we have life figured out, and in our arrogance we become hard. But life has a way of humbling us, of softening us.

When love takes you by the hand and leaves you better, that is home. That's the place to stake your claim and build your life.

Love, even that love which is imagined, is sometimes all we have to get us through.

I can only make one person happy each day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow doesn't look good, either.