Quotes About Faith

Zealous men are ever displaying to you the strength of their belief, while judicious men are showing you the grounds of it.

I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.

There is nothing anti-intellectual in the leap of faith, for faith is not believing without proof but trusting without reservation.

Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If your heart's full of hope, you can be persistent when you can't be optimistic. You can keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. So while I'm not optimistic, I'm always very hopeful.

Christians have no business thinking that the good life consists mainly in not doing bad things. We have no business thinking that to do evil in this world you have to be a Bengal tiger, when, in fact, it is enough to be a tame tabby—a nice person but not a good one. In short, Pentecost makes it clear that nothing is so fatal to Christianity as indifference.

It is terribly important to realize that the leap of faith is not so much a leap of thought as of action. For while in many matters it is first we must see then we will act; in matters of faith it is first we must do then we will know, first we will be and then we will see. One must, in short, dare to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty.

Christ came to take away our sins, not our minds.

i'm not always optimistic but i am always hopeful.

Finally in seminary I saw that Jesus was both a mirror to humanity and a window to divinity, the modest amount given to mortal eyes to see.

Hope reflects the state of your soul rather than the circumstances surrounding your days. Praise God and your soul gets stronger.

The afterlife I leave to God, who is merciful and far too busy for impertinent questions from me. I may want to know more, but I don't need to. "One world at a time"-that's my feeling and that's more than enough given the present anguish that engulfs it.

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in men shaken.

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.

Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.

The Way It Is There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn't change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can't get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding. You don't ever let go of the thread. ~ William Stafford ~

What you fear will not go away; it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That's the world, and we all live there.

Yes It could happen any time, tornado, earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen. Or sunshine, love, salvation. It could, you know. That's why we wake and look out - no guarantees in this life. But some bonuses, like morning, like right now, like noon, like evening.

If it is true that there is no fear (terror) in love, it is also true that there is no love without (reverent) fear.

We ought to bring all matters to the Lord, not only urgent ones, and discover His heart and mind on them.

There is no room for pride before the Lord, however high and privileged our service of Him may be.

Do not say, since He blessed us before we knew Him, He will again, irrespective of whether we bless him or not. This is a great mistake: He blessed us before we knew it in order that we might rise up to bless Him. He has shown His love towards us because He wants us to return it, which response on our part, apparently, is his greatest desire.

We must accept the fact of the presence of the flesh (Rom. 7:25c), but must refuse its influence in our lives as a power cancelled by Christ's death; and we must regard that potential for evil as an unwelcome residue which we are to mortify by faith in Christ's death, and keep it near the fringe of our lives until we are finally separated from it at death.

Two centuries later, the Enlightenment transmuted Christian linearism into a complementary secular faith, what historian Carl Becker called "the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers"—the belief in indefinite scientific, economic, and political improvement.

The practice of the Christian life consists of the discernment of (the seeing and hearing), and the reliance upon (the reckless and uncalculating dependence), and the celebration (the ready and spontaneous enjoyment) of the presence of the Word of God in the common life of the world.