Quotes About Faith

That's what Spirit does, it brings about new creation. And what was true thirteen billion years ago is true now.

What this particular religious system that I was working in did was ever so subtly divide the world up into two spheres Ã¢â'¬Â¦ the spiritual, and then the rest of life. As if spiritual is a dimension of life that some people have, and some don't. As if spiritual means less real than the stuff of everyday life like money and bodies and kids and houses and jobs. As if spiritual is about another time and another place when you die and leave this place.

Do you believe that God is for you? Do you believe that God's desire is that you flourish, thrive, shine? Do you believe that God wants you to be everything you could possibly be as you become more and more and more your true self?

that matters is how you respond to Jesus. And that answer totally resonates with me; it is about how you respond to Jesus. But it raises another important question: Which Jesus?

So is it not only that a person has to respond, pray, accept, believe, trust, confess, and do—but also that someone else has to act, teach, travel, organize, fund-raise, and build so that the person can know what to respond, pray, accept, believe, trust, confess, and do?

If you don't have that, you will die apart from God and spend eternity in torment in hell. The problem, however, is that the phrase "personal relationship" is found nowhere in the Bible.

So if that's it, if that's the point of it all, if that's the ticket, the center, the one unavoidable reality, the heart of the Christian faith, why is it that no one used the phrase until the last hundred years or so?

First, I'm a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God.

when people object to the idea of God, to the idea that there is more beyond our tangible, provable-with-hard-evidence observations and experiences of the world, they aren't taking the entire world into account.

But maybe all of these questions are missing the point. Let's set aside all of the saying and doing and being and cutting holes in roofs and assume it's more simple than that. As some would say, "Just believe.

And now here's the twist, the mystery, the unexpected truth about admitting that takes us back to the counterintuitive power of gospel: 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.

Heaven, for Jesus, wasn't less real, but more real.

And whenever people claim that one group is in, saved, accepted by God, forgiven, enlightened, redeemed- and everybody else isn't- why is it that those who make this claim are almost always part of the group that's in?

As obvious as it is, then, Jesus is bigger than any one religion.

When the wealthy man walks away from Jesus, Jesus turns to his disciples and says to them, "No one who has left home or wife or brothers or sisters or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age, and in the age to come eternal life" (Luke 18).

Gospel is the announcement of who God insists you are. You're

simply claims that whatever God is doing in the world to know and redeem and love and restore the world is happening through him. And so the passage is exclusive, deeply so, insisting on Jesus alone as the way to God. But it is an exclusivity on the other side on inclusivity.

Why would anybody become a Christian?" That's a question lots of people have—educated, reasonable, modern people who find becoming a Christian an "explosive," not to mention an inconceivable, thing to do.

You throw yourself into it, and you surrender the outcome, all at the same time.

when you're a pastor, your heart and soul and paycheck and doubts and faith and hopes and struggles and intellect and responsibility are all wrapped up together in a life/job that is very public.

Everyone who believes in the devil is the devil.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is darkness, light. Where there is sadness, joy. Bridget

When we lose faith in our officers of the law, it harms all of as. It cripples our criminal justice system. It threatens the most vulnerable parts of our community. It allows money and power to subvert justice.

At Boston University, where the Reverend King had been studying for his Ph.D., the faculty, impressed by him, had urged him to become an academic, but, although attracted by that prospect, he rejected it in favor of a southern pastorship; "That's where I'm needed," he told his wife, Coretta. He was to discount his role in the Montgomery boycott. "I just happened to be there," he was to say. "There comes a time when time itself is ready for a change.