Quotes About Faith

Even when Jesus felt that God had abandoned him in the Garden of Gethsemane, his confidence in the love of the Father was so great that he still desired God's will over his own. Jesus knew that he was loved whether or not he felt it. His identity was grounded in God.

Looking back, I find it remarkable how easily I accepted ideas about God as substitutes for direct experience of him. It took me a long time to begin to know God through my heart and not simply my head.

Coming to know and trust God's love is a lifelong process. Making this knowledge the foundation of our identity—or better, allowing our identity to be re-formed around this most basic fact of our existence—will also never happen instantly. Both lie at the core of the spiritual transformation that is the intended outcome of Christ-following.

The act of willing surrender is a choice of openness, a choice of abandonment of self-determination, a choice of cooperation with God.

Christian obedience should always be based on surrender to a person, not simply acceptance of an obligation. It is surrender to love, not submission to a duty.

Only the Lord God unconditionally cherishes human beings. Only the Lord God forgives all our offenses and teaches us how to forgive ourselves. Only the Lord God provides everything he demands. Only the Lord God offers the life of his own Son for the salvation of his people.

Before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves, for no one can give up what he or she does not first possess.6 Jesus puts it this way: "If you're content with simply being yourself, you will become more than yourself" (Luke 18:14 The Message). Before we can become our self we must accept our self, just as we are. Self-acceptance always precedes genuine self-surrender and self-transformation.

Life lived with resolve and determination is life lived apart from surrender.

Far from being incompatible with obedience, surrender provides the motive for obedience. We should obey God because he has won our hearts in love. If he has not, our focus should not be so much on obedience as on knowing his love. For once we get that solidly in place, obedience begins to take care of itself.

Real knowing of ourselves can only occur after we are convinced that we are deeply loved precisely as we are. The fact that God loves and knows us as sinners makes it possible for us to know and love our self as sinner. It all starts with knowing God's love.

While the first revelation of our calling is in the givens of our being, it is important to note that God's will for us does not always grow naturally out of our wishes.

God meets us in our individuality because God wants to fulfill that individuality. God wants us to follow and serve in and through that individuality. God doesn't seek to annihilate our uniqueness as we follow Christ. Rather, Christ-following leads us to our truest self.

Our call, like Jesus' call, is to live out our life in truth and in dependence on the loving will of the Father.

God sometimes calls people to a cause not born of their own abilities or most superficial desires. But his call is always absolutely congruent with our destiny, our truest self, our identity and the shape of our being.

We should never be tempted to think that growth in Christlikeness reduces our uniqueness. While some Christian visions of the spiritual life imply that as we become more like Christ we look more and more like each other, such a cultic expectation of loss of individuality has nothing in common with genuine Christian spirituality. Paradoxically, as we become more and more like Christ we become more uniquely our own true self.

The mystery of the Christian gospel is that our deepest, truest self is not what we think of as our own separate self but the self that is one with Christ. This is the reason that the self that embarks on the journey of Christ-following is not the self that arrives.

Surrender involves relaxing, and you must feel safe before you can relax. How could anyone ever expect to feel safe enough to relax in the presence of a God who is preoccupied with their shortcomings

Often they become uncomfortable with an emphasis on divine love; they feel an urgent need to balance this by highlighting God's hatred of sin. Unfortunately, while they may give intellectual assent to God's love, they often experience very little of it.

Similarly, people who are afraid to look deeply at themselves will of course be equally afraid to look deeply at God. For such persons, ideas about God provide a substitute for direct experience of God.

Some Christians speak of a personal encounter with Jesus as if this were a one-time matter—something that happens at conversion. This is a tragic confusion of an introduction and a relationship. A first encounter is just that—a first encounter. What God longs for us to experience is intimate knowing that comes by means of an ongoing relationship.

Calling brings freedom and fulfillment because it orients us toward something bigger than self.

After several years of hellfire sermons, I did what any reasonable ten-year-old child would do under the circumstances—I accepted Christ into my heart and began seeking to live a life that would please God.

These Isai Muslims revealed that the biggest obstacle they faced in coming to Christ was their own Muslim family and community.

Though they do remain within the Muslim communities, they often face persecution because of their steadfast assertion that they are Isai Muslims, meaning they are followers of Jesus (literally, Muslims who belong to Jesus).