Quotes About Trust

Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is time to end this standoff, and to reestablish a hermeneutic of trust (itself a sign of the gospel!) in place of the hermeneutic of suspicion which the church has so disastrously borrowed from the postmodern world.

Worship is humble and glad; worship forgets itself in remembering God; worship celebrates the truth as God's truth, not its own. True worship doesn't put on a show or make a fuss; true worship isn't forced, isn't half-hearted, doesn't keep looking at its watch, doesn't worry what the person in the next pew is doing. True worship is open to God, adoring God, waiting for God, trusting God even in the dark.

make your top priority God's kingdom and his way of life, and all these things will be given to you as well.

In the Lord, your labour is not in vain: what you do here in faith will stand, will last.

Read John 14:1-31. Why does Jesus feel the need to reassure the disciples at this point (v. 1)? 2. What bold claim does Jesus make about himself in verse 6? 3. Why does this kind of claim often make people uncomfortable?

Even when Polycarp is on trial for his life, he is content to say, like Jesus before Pilate in John 19.11, that God has appointed the pagan governor who is about to [165] pass sentence.

What the early Christians meant by "belief" included both believing that God had done certain things and believing in the God who had done them. This is not belief that God exists, though clearly that is involved, too, but loving, grateful trust.

the word the early Christians used for "faith" can also mean "loyalty" or "allegiance.

Whenever God does something new, he involves people – often unlikely people, frequently surprised and alarmed people. He asks them to trust him in a new way, to put aside their natural reactions, to listen humbly for a fresh word and to act on it without knowing exactly how it's going to work out.

Turn back' –turn back from doing things your own way, from organizing your life according to your own hopes and whims. If God is becoming king, and if Jesus is being installed as the human king through whom God's kingdom is now happening, the only appropriate reaction is to abandon our own little hopes and schemes and let God be God in our lives. And through our lives.

Because of God's call and promise, Abraham is the beginning of the truly human people. He is the one who, in a faith which Paul sees as the true antecedent of Christian faith, allows his thinking and believing to be determined, not by the way the world is, and not by the way his own body is, but by the promises and actions of God.

Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God.

sets us free in our personal lives from the need to worship or trust idols, and in our public lives from the pressure to serve the needs of an idolatrous state.

Old soldiers sometimes say, "There are no atheists in foxholes." (A foxhole, in military slang, is a shallow pit in a dangerous place on the battlefield.)

Being a good friend is like being a lifesaver.

Once a good friend like me, always a good friend like me.

A lie does not become truth just because ten people are telling it.

How did I find out? I was deceiving him.

God, how easy it is to get people to believe. In fact the only thing no one would believe is how little one has to offer for a soul. There's not even any thrill in it. It's like culling cattle, whole nations. You don't have to promise them eternity, you just have to lie with them in the darkness, and sometimes sing them a song.

From now on the destiny of the whole world is in Mark Levin's and God's hands.

Be gentle with him, Mercy. He's got a heart as big as Texas— he'll die for you without blinking. But he doesn't expect anyone to do the same for him.

Elena: "I guess a dying woman can be stupid if she wants. I'm crazy about you, Archangel. You scare the shit out of me at times, but I want to dance with you anyway.

How can I be angry with the other half of my soul?" he asked, his tone so tender it tore little pieces out of her heart. "I have a temper, baby, and I know I fucking brood. But even if I act pissed, even if I snarl, it doesn't mean I love you any less. Your soul shines, Tally, and I'm so damn glad it shines for me.

She was his and he was hers. They had under-the-skin privileges.