Quotes About Belief

This present world is a perfectly safe place for us to be." That certainly is what Jesus, and the Bible as a whole, has to say to us. "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever" (Ps 23).

How to combine faith with obedience is surely the essential task of the church as it enters the twenty-first century.

With this magnificent God positioned among us, Jesus brings the assurance that our universe is a perfectly safe place for us to be. The

if we are not prepared to use our power of choice to turn our minds to God, then we do not have contact with God.

The sad truth is that people can be just as arrogant from belief, commitment, various associations, or simple egotism as from claimed knowledge.

Pastors now are mistakenly seen, and perhaps even see themselves, as teaching what Christians are supposed to believe (perhaps what we had better believe), not what is known and what can be known through fair inquiry.

No, you don't have to certain about anything you're not certain about. In fact, certainty is not something you can choose, anyway. Certainty and uncertainty are not things that are under the will.

Whatever your situation, there is nothing more important on earth than to dwell in the knowledge of Christ and to bring that knowledge to others.

I realize that I will either allow my view of evil to determine my view of God and will cut him down accordingly, or I will allow my view of God to determine my view of the evil and will elevate him accordingly, accepting that nothing is beyond his power for good.

Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith. They do not realize that in so doing they are not honoring God, but simply yielding to the deeply anti-intellectualist currents of Western egalitarianism, rooted, in turn, in the romantic idealization of impulse and blind feeling found in David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and their nineteenth- and twentieth-century followers.

The intellect is good. Our natural abilities of perception are good, and they are not opposed to faith. Please hear me: our natural abilities are not opposed to faith. Yes, we live by faith and not by sight, but try not using your sight at all and see how that works. When Jesus walked this earth, he used all of his human powers—all of them—and we are called to devote all of our human powers to God in order that we might live under him as he intended.

I don't believe God messes with our minds. He is not mean, and if he has something to say to me, he will say it.

Every Christian must strive to arrive at beliefs about God that faithfully reflect the realities of his or her life and experience, so that each may know how to live effectively before him in his world. That's theology!

Put his words into practice and find them to be true.

we can be sure that heaven in the sense of our afterlife is just our future in this universe. There is not another universe besides this one. God created the heavens and the earth. That's it. And much of the difficulty in having a believable picture of heaven and hell today comes from the centuries-long tendency to "locate" them in "another reality" outside the created universe.

Let us now be perfectly clear. Your life is not something from which you can stand aside and consider what it would have been like had you had a different one. There is no "you" apart from your actual life. You are not separate from your life, and in that life you must find the goodness of God. Otherwise, you will not believe that he has done well by you, and you will not truly be at peace with him.

You must make the decision to have Jesus with you. A decision is an inward resolve to do whatever is necessary to bring something to pass.

This not-knowing is a game of irresponsibility. It is a way of saying I'm not responsible. I'm an agnostic.

John 3:16 is not about forgiveness of sins, no matter the guy with rainbow hair in the end zone who's holding up that sign. John 3:16 is about life now.

Dallas Willard

The miracle is not that God loves me; it would be a miracle if he didn't love me, because he is love. That is God's basic nature—a will to good.

Joy and Confidence

confident (con-fide, literally acting "with faith") about who we are and what we are doing. To be with Jesus is to have both.

everyone has been certain and wrong. Certainty is a psychological state that you can work up. You see a lot of this in religious groups. They are trying to work up certainty, but that is a terrible mistake. When you convey knowledge, you are giving people things they can test and find to be true in reality.