Quotes from Craig S. Keener

If we must "feel" God's presence before we believe he is with us, we again reduce God to our ability to grasp him, making him an idol instead of acknowledging him as God.

Every Christian generation learns equally the lessons of Revelation—that God is in control, that the powers of the world are minuscule when compared with God, that God is as likely to work through apparent weakness and failure as through strength and success, and that in the end God's people will prevail.

a bland Jesus who simply told people to look at the lilies of the field - such a Jesus would threaten no one, just as the university professors who created him threaten no one.

When one employs a method of verifying miracles that insists that they be replicable in controlled settings, yet regards as natural and nonmiraculous any event that is so replicable,[121] one has framed the method so as to secure the expected antisupernatural outcome.

One can never satisfy a closed mind

An important step in getting to know God is to realize how available he is to us. In learning to hear God, it helps us to take on faith the fact that we are already in his presence. If we must make ourselves worthy of his presence first, we will never get there.

God is consistent with his nature and declared purposes in Scripture, but he is not limited to our finite understanding of him or the ways we think he should work.

We should know and celebrate God with our whole person. While too many Christians neglect to serve God with the mind, others cultivate only their minds and neglect the emotional aspects of worship.

Because I am committed to the truth of Scripture, I must try to understand what Scripture says, even if it transcends my own experience.

The fact that God is sovereign over the distribution of gifts (1 Cor. 12:7) is no reason not to seek the gifts. God is sovereign over our food too, but though he desires to provide it for his children (see Matt. 6:25–34) and wants us to seek his kingdom first (Matt. 6:9–10, 33), he expects us to pray for him to provide our food (Matt. 6:11; 7:7–11).

Until those charismatic churches who have poor teaching can supply both spiritual empowerment and sounder teaching, many of them will continue to be only a way station for Christians who need a fresh spiritual experience but who end up taking it elsewhere once they have it.

Those who look down on other Christians because they lack a particular gift or experience, or those who despise a particular gift and look down on Christians who have it, are not demonstrating spiritual maturity.

That Jesus is popular in Mark 2:2, however, is not a general model for Christian ministry; the rest of Mark itself shows that eventually crowds denounced Jesus (15:13–14). From these narratives we might learn to use any popularity for good at the moment but not to count on it enduring.

God is consistent with his nature and declared purposes in Scripture, but he is not limited to our finite understanding of him or the ways we think he should work.

So pervasively has Enlightenment culture's anti-supernaturalism affected the Western church, especially educated European and North American Christians, that most of us are suspicious of anything supernatural.

If we must "feel" God's presence before we believe he is with us, we again reduce God to our ability to grasp him, making him an idol instead of acknowledging him as God.

Western theology invariably asks the question: Are miracles possible? This of course addresses the Enlightenment problem of a closed universe. In much of Asia that is a non-question because the miraculous is assumed and fairly regularly experienced.—Hwa Yung

He does miracles when we need them—not for our entertainment or to make us feel "spiritual.

Spiritual giftedness does not guarantee that we hear from God rightly on every point.

Granted, God is sovereign and can speak as he pleases—through a proof text, a poem, or Balaam's donkey. But we do not regularly seek out donkeys to tell us how to live.

Revelation addresses many issues that have not changed because human nature and God's character have remained constant. It

Only by depending on God's power can we offer worship truly worthy of his honor.

The book of Revelation is a book of worship that summons us to recognize the awesome majesty of our Lord.

If the early Christian accounts of dramatic signs make these works seem foreign and foreboding to segments of modern Western academia,[85] they are nevertheless welcome in many of the dynamic churches of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, which believe that they share their experiences.