Quotes About Witness

It is the vision of a slaughtered Lamb, not a ferocious Lion. "The shock of this reversal," writes Richard Hays, "discloses the central mystery of the Apocalypse: God overcomes the world not through a show of force but through the suffering and death of Jesus, 'the faithful witness [martys]

Revelation is a manifesto against civil religion and a summons to uncivil worship and witness. Revelation is a sustained stripping of the sacred from secular power—military, political, economic—and a parallel sustained recognition of God and the Lamb as the rightful bearers of sacred claims, the only worthy recipients of divine accolades.

Revelation is therefore a prophetic, pastoral, visionary guide to worshiping and following the Lamb, a template for faithful witness against civil religion and for true worship of the true God. It calls us to unlearn and abandon the false but often seductive gospel of empire and civil religion as it calls us to learn and practice, in worship and witness, the truth of the Lamb's eternal gospel.

a good summary of Revelation's message: uncivil worship and witness: following the Lamb out of fallen Babylon into the new creation.

For every culture-hero living out his myth, there must be a witness willing to pass the story on. Then

U zult ongetwijfeld het verhaal hebben gehoord over de dood van de Maagd van Orléans... Ik weet wat er die dag is gebeurd, de laatste dag van mei in het jaar onzes Heren 1431 in Rouen. Ik was erbij.

While we may not be called to martyr our lives, we must martyr our way of life. We must put our selfish ways to death and march to a different beat. Then the world will see Jesus.

But when he was the federal prosecutor in New Jersey, Christie had sent Jared's father, Charles Kushner, to jail in 2005. Charlie Kushner, pursued by the feds for an income tax cheat, set up a scheme with a prostitute to blackmail his brother-in-law, who was planning to testify against him.

People's voices never change, no more than the expressions in their eyes. Amid the generalised physical collapse that is old age, the voice and the eyes bear painfully indisputable witness to the persistence of character, aspirations, and desires, everything that constitutes a human personality.

It's real. I saw it. It isn't alive.

This world has been patient with you, be patient with it too. True strength of a human is patience. Patience increases inner strength and endurance. Patience makes you a witness of darkness unto sunrise, patience is a virtue of faith, gets everyone MickeyMized.

For Mark Strand, the poet's responsibility to be a witness, a recorder of experience, is part of the broader responsibility we all have for keeping the universe ordered through our consciousness:

ONE BY ONE I HAD WATCHED THEM ALL DIE.

I might believe some powerful truths, but if those beliefs are only in my head and don't impact the way I live, nothing about my life will draw others to faith.

I'll tell you also other things, so as to teach you knowledge. Such as; if a quarrel breaks out,do not approach the contenders! If you are chided and don't know how to repel the heat, call the listeners to witness and delay the answer.

A vow is a purely religious act which cannot be taken in a fit of passion. It can be taken only with a mind purified and composed and with God as witness.

We are not a fortress Church. We are a Church of witness. What we do and say must be done in the light. ...We are therefore vulnerable to misquotation and misinterpretation... It is in this spirit of openness and charity and with prudent care, that I propose to examine all the functions of the decasteries.

For me, journalism means being the first witness to tell the truth to the public. Going beyond your own opinions.

The church is not simply a religious body looking for a safe place to do its own thing within a wider political or social world. The church is neither more nor less than people who bear witness, by their very existence and in particular their holiness and their unity (Colossians 3), that Jesus is the world's true lord, ridiculous or even scandalous though this may seem.

The gospels are, and were written to be, fresh tellings of the story of Jesus designed to be the charter of the community of Jesus's first followers and those who, through their witness, then and subsequently, have joined in and have learned to hear, see, and know Jesus in word and sacrament.

The point about truth, and about Jesus and his followers bearing witness to it, is that truth is what happens when humans use words to reflect God's wise ordering of the world and so shine light into its dark corners, bringing judgment and mercy where it is badly needed. Empires can't cope with this. They make their own 'truth,' creating 'facts on the ground' in the depressingly normal way of violence and injustice.

The church is to live as the alternative polis, not by separating itself into sectarian isolation but by bearing witness, like Daniel and his friends, before kings and rulers. The aim is not to damn, but to redeem; the leaves on the tree are for the healing of the nations, and the gates stand open for the kings of the earth to bring their treasures. Only if we keep that goal before us will we avoid the isolation which is the mirror image of collusion.

There is no way back. No other explanations have been offered, in two thousand years of sneering skepticism toward the Christian witness, that can satisfactorily account for how the tomb came to be empty, how the disciples came to see Jesus, and how their lives and worldviews were transformed.

Faith can't be forced, but unfaith can be challenged. That is how it has always been, from the very beginning, when people have borne witness to Jesus's resurrection.