Quotes About Faith

everybody is resting on a set of interpretations, and we need to be honest about it.

Has God created millions of people over tens of thousands of years who are going to spend eternity in anguish? Can God do this, or even allow this, and still claim to be a loving God? Does God punish people for thousands of years with infinite, eternal torment for things they did in their few finite years of life?

But when we talk about God, we're talking about the very straightforward affirmation that everything has a singular, common source and is infinitely, endlessly, deeply connected.

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.

Grace is when you aren't striving or controlling or trying to change or manipulate or make something happen. Grace is when you find yourself carried along, when all that's left to do is receive. Grace is when you know you're loved, exactly as you are. Grace is an entirely different way of experiencing life.

The way of Jesus is a journey, not a destination.

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

The great Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, "I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder."17

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.

There's a line in the Bible about the God who is above all and through all and in all. Just one line, but so massive. Above all and through all and in all.

Doctrine is a wonderful servant and a horrible master.

But sometimes when I hear people quote the Bible, I just want to throw up.

If anybody didn't have a Messiah complex, it was Jesus.

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.

The Bible was written by Jewish people who belonged to a Jewish minority living under the oppression of a succession of massive military superpowers who had conquered them: The Egyptians, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans. These

when I'm talking about God, I'm talking about a reality known, felt, and experienced, but one that cannot be located in any specific physical space in any tangible way.

Strange, how the writer doesn't explain why Abraham leaves other than saying he hears a divine voice. Something intimate and infinite is calling to him, and he listens.