Quotes About Scripture

While the official church was moribund, the house churches kept alight the flame of Christian witness. The church survived as a lay movement, often led by poorly educated Bible women who memorized Scripture and passed on the faith to family members and (if they dared) to neighbors and friends.

I have observed that radical faith is so convicting to doubters, the lukewarm, the halfhearted and the religious who have re-scripted the Bible in a way that requires them to live only in the realm of reason. The truth is, you have to either be the next one out of the boat or find some spiritual excuse to relieve your cowardliness.

There are three keys here that God said would determine his success. First, the Law of God was to be in his mouth. Next, he was to meditate on it day and night. And finally, he was to do all that he was talking about and meditating on.

If the church as a whole is losing its ability to be "salt and light" in the culture, it is not because its members have no opinion of the films of Bernardo Bertolucci, no appreciation for the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and no regular slot on The Charlie Rose Show. More likely, it is because they do not have a solid grasp of the basic elements of the faith, as taught in Scripture and affirmed by the confessions and catechisms of the church.

The collapse in evangelical doctrinal consensus is intimately related to the collapse in the understanding of, and role assigned to, Scripture as God's Word spoken within the church.

We must hold firmly to the conviction that God gives no one his Spirit or grace except through or with the external Word.

There is a time for all seasons," he quoted Scripture. "A time to break down and a time to build up. You've had your time to break down, and now it's your time to build up. Don't punish yourself for what you didn't do.

When slogging through the myriad of laws about priestly worship practices, the tabernacle, uncleanness, and primitive issues of justice, you may feel like the wheels are coming off your momentum. Yet this part of Scripture is also God's gift to His people. Gems here are waiting to be unearthed from under the seemingly crusty surface, and those gems form a vital part of the foundation of the Bible's grand story.

Christian experience is rightly used when it helps to convince us that the events narrated in the New Testament actually did occur; but it can never enable us to be Christians whether the events occurred or not. It is a fair flower, and should be prized as a gift of God. But cut it from its root in the blessed Book, and it soon withers away and dies.

In Scripture, faith involves placing trust in what you have reason to believe is true. Faith is not a blind, irrational leap into the dark. So faith and reason cooperate on a biblical view of faith. They are not intrinsically hostile.

I fear that our inaccurate emphasis on the Holy Spirit's role in understanding Scripture has become an easy shortcut to the hard work of building a personal library of study tools and using them.

Faith in the self-attesting Christ of Scripture is the beginning, not the end result of wisdom.

It is better to preach five words of God's Word than five million words of man's wisdom.

The Bhagavad-Gita is a true scripture of the human race a living creation rather than a book, with a new message for every age and a new meaning for every civilization.

Although devotion is to be given to many institutes and teachers, the essence is to be taken from them all, as the bee takes the essence from many flowers.- Samkhya, 4.13, an Eastern scripture

Your call will become clear as as your mind is transformed by the reading of Scripture and the internal work of God's Spirit. The Lord never hides His will from us. In time, as you obey the call first to follow, your destiny will unfold before you. The difficulty will lie in keeping other concerns from diverting your attention.

If we have been diligent to hide the Word of God in our hearts, and if we continue to labor over that Word, we can be assured that in the time of harvest we will reap a bountiful reward if we faint not. (See Galatians 6:9.)

Flecks of foam on the fountain's lips as it reads aloud from the scripture of water.

God's Word must inform not only our goals, but also our methods.

Among the many problems with taking the Bible literally is it reduces the most mysterious and complex of realities to simple - even simplistic - terms. Yes, scripture speaks of fire and damnation and eternal bliss, but the Bible is the product of human hands and hearts, and much of the imagery is allegorical, not meteorological.

I don't know why Christians keep fighting over which is better-singleness or marriage-when it seems rather obvious, both from Scripture and from Church history, that both can glorify God.

A false interpretation of Scripture causes that the gospel of the Lord becomes the gospel of man, or, which is worse, of the devil.

We must read our Bibles like men digging for hidden treasure.

I got more true knowledge from reading the Book of God in one month, than I could ever have acquired from all the writings of men.