Quotes About Belief

But it isn't a choice, because Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, the life." If you come across truth in any form, it isn't outside your faith as a Christian. Your faith just got bigger. To be a Christian is to claim truth wherever you find it.

Often times when I meet atheists and we talked about the god they don't believe in, we quickly discover that I don't believe in that god either.

Catherine of Aragon said,"None get to God but through trouble.

But the first Christians didn't see Jesus this way, as if God were somewhere else and then cooked up some way to solve the sin problem at the last minute by getting involved as Jesus. They believed that Jesus was somehow more, that Jesus had actually been present since before creation and had been a part of the story all along.

people are rarely persuaded by arguments, but more often by experiences.

a person who speaks to this hour's need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth.

In the religious version, you'll often hear that when this happens, one group heads to a good place, and the rest of humanity heads to a bad place. (The people who tell this version of the story are always in the good group, coincidentally enough.) And so your job is to get as many people inside the tent/club/religion/group as possible so that when that day comes, you can all escape together and go somewhere else.

A Christian is not someone who expects to spend forever in heaven there. A Christian is someone who anticipates spending forever here, in a new heaven that comes to earth.

Like a mirror, God appears to be more and more a reflection of whoever it is that happens to be talking about God at the moment.

We cannot earn what we have always had. What we can do is trust that what God keeps insisting is true about us is actually true.

There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.

Spirit often reveals the ways in which we have ever so subtly submitted to the belief that this is just how it is. Spirit refuses to accept that this is just how it is, because spirit is inherently creative.

There are those, like the church websites quoted at the beginning of this chapter, who put it quite clearly: "We get one life to choose heaven or hell, and once we die, that's it. One or the other, forever." God in the end doesn't get what God wants, it's declared, because some will turn, repent, and believe, and others won't.

for a staggering number of people in our world the for of the Jesus message has been buried under a massive pile of againsts. Somewhere

When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.

Doctrine is a wonderful servant and a horrible master.

Often times when I meet atheists and we talk about the god they don't believe in, we quickly discover that I don't believe in that god either. So when we hear that a certain person has "rejected Christ," we should first ask, "Which Christ?

The point of the Abraham-and-Isaac story isn't that you should sacrifice your kid but that you can leave behind any notion of a god who demands that you sacrifice your kid.

God is not a question about what may or may not be up there or above or out there— God is what we're unquestionably in.

Jesus says, he "did not come to judge the world, but to save the world" (John 12). We can name Jesus, orient our lives around him, and celebrate

Being a Christian then is more about celebrating mystery than conquering it.

And if you keep telling people who they are, who their best selves are, if you keep reminding them of their true identity, there's a good chance they'll figure out what to

And so, beginning with the early church, there is a long tradition of Christians who believe that God will ultimately restore everything and everybody, because Jesus says in Matthew 19 that there will be a "renewal of all things," Peter says in Acts 3 that Jesus will "restore everything," and Paul says in Colossians 1 that through Christ "God was pleased to . . . reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

So when people say they don't believe in hell and they don't like the word "sin," my first response is to ask, "Have you sat and talked with a family who just found out their child has been molested?