Quotes About Belief

And this 'justification', which is, of course, possible only because of the sheer grace and mercy of God acted out in the death and resurrection of his son, is made not on the basis of a new 'personal relationship with God' or some other religious experience but rather on the basis of the belief that Jesus is lord and that God raised him from the dead.

What would happen if we were to take seriously our stated belief that Jesus Christ is already the Lord of the world and that at his name, one day, every knee would bow?

Paul is the classic example of the early Christian who has woven resurrection so thoroughly into his thinking and practice that if you take it away the whole thing unravels in your hands.

Saul had been absolutely right in his devotion to the One God, but absolutely wrong in his understanding of who that One God was and how his purposes would be fulfilled.

Christian people of the Western world—have not been ready to recognize Jesus himself. We want a "religious" leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus's contemporaries did. But if Christians don't get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?

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.)

Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from teh dead, but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which skepticism of various sorts have long been hiding.

But to call that statement 'dualistic' (or to regard a belief in the existence of hostile powers as 'dualistic') can mislead us into forgetting that most Jews, Paul included, regarded the present world as, none the less, the good creation of the good creator, and the present time as under the creator's sovereign providence. Part of the point of many actual apocalypses is to affirm this very point, in the teeth of apparently contradictory evidence.

left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

Arguments about God are] like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining.

We could cope—the world could cope—with a Jesus who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples' minds and hearts. The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God's new creation right in the middle of the old one.

What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.

There is nothing that torments Satan more than the sight of a faithful in prayer.

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

God is just a name for our wonder.

The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.

I'm an atheist. I wouldn't even call myself an agnostic. I am an atheist.

Communists are the last optimists.

You don't have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense - there's a difference between thinking to oneself and thinking as a form of conversation, even if there are no answers.

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.

God did not intend religion to be an exercise club.

Don't live in the world as if you were renting or here only for the summer, but act as if it was your father's house. . .Believe in seeds, earth, and the sea, but people above all. Love clouds, machines, and books, but people above all." Nazim Hikmet, 20th century Turkish poet

The implication of this is that the mind's possibilities are limited by its concept of its potential.

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