Quotes from John Webster

When we hear prophecy, we may not and must not treat it with cool detachment; prophecy isn't a matter for our appraisal but for our attention.

Why is it that we often go away from Scripture unmoved, unaffected, dull? In the end, it's because we refuse to be schooled by Christ.

In company with Christians down through the ages, we read…every passage of Scripture…out of the fact that for us, the center of Scripture is Jesus Christ.

We make desire, not truth, the real clue to what's valuable. If we desire something, then it has value; if not, we despise and reject.

Betrayal means that, faced with opposition or temptation or ridicule, we fail to stand by a commitment to another. It's another instance of that vicious lack of integrity which affects human life and fellowship—we make promises but break them; our word is not our bond; our fidelity is worthless.

God bends even our sins to his purpose.

Fellowship with God is what human beings are for. That is, we flourish as human beings if we live in free and joyful and humble relation to God. To be human is to be in relation to God—and that relation to God is not a sort of added extra, something to supplement our lives. It is the core of being human; it is the way in which we are properly alive. We are alive and truly human as we live in and from that fellowship.

Religion is sin when it makes God into something which we can handle.

God is not silent; God says, as Isaiah puts it, "Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live" (Isaiah 55:3). Faith

Paul's contentment derives from God. It's not a matter of human strength of character; it's a matter of human weakness transfigured by the astonishing sufficiency of God. Contentment is that exercise of faith in which we accept the sufficiency of God. It's not feeling all right; it's not mastery of circumstance. It's the fruit of the conversion of our lives to the grace and goodness of God.

Contentment is not mastering circumstances but faith in God.

None of us is exempt; all of us have to realize that religion always carries with it the danger that we will make God into the likeness of something on earth, and in doing so we will lose faith, and lose God. What

And grace is a little New Testament shorthand word for the miracle of God's mercy in Jesus Christ. Grace has a name, the name of Jesus; he is grace, embodied and acted out: "For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people" (Titus 2:11). To say that we are under grace is to say that the final truth of our lives, the final authority by which we are made and judged, is Jesus Christ the mercy of God.

Its place is in the shady world of political trade-offs and vacillating leaders and institutions hell-bent on survival.

Jesus' passion shows us up for what we are. It's the hour of the world's judgment, because it is the hour when God lets the world have its own way.

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle. She died young.

Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness.

I account this world a tedious theater, For I do play a part in 't 'gainst my will.

What a strange creature is a laughing fool, As if a man were created to no use But only to show his teeth.

Do you not weep? Other sins only speak, murder shreaks out: The element of water moistens the earth, But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens.

The weakest arm is strong enough that strikes with the sword of justice.

What's this flesh? A little cruded milk Fantastical puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those Paper prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, Since our is to preserve earth-worms. Didst thou ever seen A lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world Is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o'er our heads Like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge Of the small compass of our prison.

There's nothing of so infinite vexation as man's own thoughts

Heaven-gates are not so highly arched As princes' palaces; they that enter there Must go upon their knees.