Quotes About Faith

the one about Abraham leaving, is revolutionary. It's a step forward in human consciousness. You can step out of the cycle? You can leave? And head into the unknown? You can step into something that hasn't happened yet, that doesn't exist yet?

The Bible is a library of books reflecting how human beings have understood the divine.

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.

The poet wants us to know that God is looking for partners, people to help co-create the world.

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?

Embracing your ikigai will always require tremendous faith and courage.

Exactly. It's about a particular kind of relationship with a particular kind of God, one who is good and kind and generous. One who can be trusted. One who keeps insisting, Trust me, I got this.

Yes. Abraham is being invited to trust God, to believe that God is good and has his best interests in mind and will be faithful to him even if Abraham makes a mess of things.

This is why it's absolutely vital for you to embrace at the outset the idea that you are a divine piece of work, created to do good in the world. The universe is not neutral or, worse, against you. When you set out to find your path, the universe is on your side. That is the faith that keeps you going.

It's possible to resist the very growth and change and expanding consciousness that God desires for you by appealing to your religious convictions.

Taking heaven seriously, then, means taking suffering seriously, now. Not because we've bought into the myth that we can create a utopia given enough time, technology, and good voting choices, but because we have great confidence that God has not abandoned human history and is actively at work within it, taking it somewhere

Sabbath is when you spend a day remembering that efficiency and production are not God's highest goals for your life. Joy is.

It often appears that those who talk the most about going to heaven when you die talk the least about bringing heaven to earth right now, as Jesus taught us to pray: "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." At the same time, it often appears that those who talk the most about relieving suffering now talk the least about heaven when we die.

Our eschatology shapes our ethics. Eschatology is about last things. Ethics are about how you live. What you believe about the future shapes, informs, and determines how you live now.

If you believe that you're going to leave and evacuate to somewhere else, then why do anything about this world? A proper view of heaven leads not to escape from the world, but to full engagement with it, all with the anticipation of a coming day when things are on earth as they currently are in heaven.

I saw that there's no word for spiritual in the Hebrew scriptures (also called the Old Testament). So basic, and yet so revolutionary. There's no word for spiritual, because to call something spiritual would be to imply that other things aren't. In the Bible, everything is spiritual. All of life.

This insistence that God will be united and reconciled with all people is a theme the writers and prophets return to again and again. They are very specific in their beliefs about who God is and what God is doing in the world, constantly affirming the simple fact that God does not fail.

First, I'm a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God. I realize that for some people, hearing talk about Jesus shrinks and narrows the discussion about God, but my experience has been the exact opposite. My experiences of Jesus have opened my mind and my heart to a bigger, wider, more expansive and mysterious and loving God who I believe is actually up to something in the world.

How we respond to what happens to us—especially the painful, excruciating things that we never wanted and we have no control over—is a creative

Heaven comforts, but it also confronts.

Now what? I realize now that those two words were forming a prayer. Now what? In a visceral way, prayer is naming what matters to you. Now what? is what mattered to me.

read in the Psalms, The earth is the LORD's and everything in it.

It's very common to hear talk about heaven framed in terms of who "gets in" or how to "get in." What we find Jesus teaching, over and over and over again, is that he's interested in our hearts being transformed, so that we can actually handle heaven.

This is the opposite of brainwashing. This is the opposite of Just believe and don't ask questions. He keeps inviting people to think critically, to examine, question, doubt, test, struggle. To own it for themselves. I came across this line in the New Testament: Test everything. I love that line. It's