Quotes About Scripture

Today, spend a little time reading more about the practice of lectio divina. When you feel as though it makes sense to you, look up the key passages for the day in the daily missal, or online. Choose one of these to use for lectio, and then take it to your place of prayer. Because it is a form of meditation, it's important that you give it plenty of quiet, uninterrupted time. Sit here while I go over there and pray. (Mt 26:36)

It is time that you stand on the only thing that can never be shaken or changed. Stand upon my Word!

A prophetic word is a special inspired message or word that a person receives in his or her inner spirit after a season of fasting and extended prayer or, at times, through an inspired utterance from Scripture and occasionally confirmed by a vocal gift from another believer.

Strong believers will run to the Word and not from the Word in times of attack.

Get in the Word until the Word gets in you. Cast down evil imaginations.

There is a reason Scripture instructs us to "hold fast our confession" of faith (Heb. 4:14), and to pray without being double minded or without wavering (James 1:5–8). Confession is always verbal and never just mental agreement. Prayer is verbal petitioning but holding on to your prayer centers on confession

Remember, Christ never broke the written instructions of God. He only broke the traditions of men

The Word of God works when you take the instructions, follow them, speak them, and act upon them.

Waiting on God, according to Scripture, is not a passive, vacuous state but rather an active process of asking, seeking and engaging with his Spirit.

The ultimate challenge of a Jesus-centered hermeneutic is that it makes love the lens through which we must henceforth read, interpret, and apply all Scripture. "The whole Bible does nothing but tell of God's love," says Augustine of Hippo.

Christians read the Bible not as a document from history but as a world into which they enter so that God may meet them there.

Expressed otherwise in terms of the principle of context—a principle essential for sound understanding of any text but preeminently and uniquely so for Scripture—every unit of biblical material, however quantified, is qualified by a pattern of contexts relative to itself.

BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS are about as certain as you can be about these things that the conquest of Canaan as the Bible describes did not happen: no mass invasion from the outside by an Israelite army, and no extermination of Canaanites as God commanded.

If we let the Bible be the Bible, on its own terms—on God's terms—we will see this in-fleshing God at work, not despite the challenges, the unevenness, and ancient strangeness of the Bible, but precisely because of these things. Perhaps not the way we would have written our sacred book, if we had been consulted, but the one that the good and wise God has allowed his people to have.

The Bible shows us that obedience to God is not about cutting and pasting the Bible over our lives, but seeking the path of wisdom—holding the sacred book in one hand and ourselves, our communities of faith, and our world in the other in order to discern how the God of old is present here and now.

As Jesus, the Word, is of divine origin as well as a thoroughly human figure of first-century Palestine, so is the Bible of ultimately divine origin yet also thoroughly a product of its time.

We should not be surprised when we find ourselves in a similar spot, experiencing a God who is not beholden to our thinking, a God who doesn't act according to our sense of certainty, even if we can find a Bible verse or two to back it up. God can't be proof-texted. God will not be backed into a corner.

Literalism is a hermeneutical decision (often implicit) stemming from the belief that God's Word requires a literal reading.

a literal reading of Genesis is not the firmly settled default position of true faith to which one can "hold firm" or from which one "strays." Literalism is a hermeneutical decision (often implicit) stemming from the belief that God's Word requires a literal reading.

The period of the monarchy is not only the meat of the Old Testament narrative of Israel. It's also the period when Israel's grand narrative was written.

as Christ is both God and human, so is the Bible.

The findings of the past 150 years have made extrabiblical evidence an unavoidable conversation partner. The result is that, as perhaps never before in the history of the church, we can see how truly provisional and incomplete certain dimensions of our understanding of Scripture can be. On the other hand, we are encouraged to encounter the depth and riches of God's revelation and to rely more and more on God's Spirit, who speaks to the church in Scripture.

the Bible is ancient, ambiguous, and diverse.

The problem isn't the Bible. The problem is coming to the Bible with expectations it's not set up to bear.