Quotes About Faith

Today, each time an election rolls around Christians debate whether this or that candidate is "God's man" for the White House. Projecting myself back into Jesus' time, I had difficulty imagining him pondering whether Tiberius, Octavius, or Julius Caesar was "God's man" for the empire.

According to Jesus, what I think about him and how I respond will determine my destiny for all eternity.

Religious faith—for all its problems, despite its maddening tendency to replicate ungrace—lives on because we sense the numinous beauty of a gift undeserved that comes at unexpected moments from Outside. Refusing to believe that our lives of guilt and shame lead to nothing but annihilation, we hope against hope for another place run by different rules. We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.

The world thirsts for grace. When grace descends, the world falls silent before it.

The essence of Christian faith has come to us in story form, the story of a God who will go to any lengths to get his family back. The Bible tells of flawed people -- people just like me -- who make shockingly bad choices and yet still find themselves pursued by God. As they receive grace and forgiveness, naturally they want to give it to others, and a thread of hope and transformation weaves its way throughout the Bible's accounts.

I could no more pray the Our Father, I could no longer call myself a Christian, if I refuse to forgive. Humanly speaking, I cannot do it, but God will give us his strength!

Stanley Hauerwas, named "America's best theologian" by Time magazine, summed up the problem: "I have come to think that the challenge confronting Christians is not that we do not believe what we say, though that can be a problem, but that what we say we believe does not seem to make any difference for either the church or the world.

Grace is for the desperate, the needy, the broken, those who cannot make it on their own. Grace is for all of

Whatever you may believe about it, the birth of Jesus was so important that it split history into two parts. Everything that has ever happened on this planet falls into a category of before Christ or after Christ.

We, Jesus' followers, are the agents assigned to carry out God's will on earth. Too easily we expect God to do something for us when instead God wants to do it through us.

C. S. Lewis shocked many people in his day when he came out in favor of allowing divorce, on the grounds that we Christians have no right to impose our morality on society at large. Although he would continue to oppose divorce on moral grounds, he maintained the distinction between morality and legality.

Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.

Dependence, sorrow, repentance, a longing to change—these are the gates to God's kingdom.

Some people worry that prayer may lead to passivity, that we will retreat to prayer as a substitute for action. Jesus saw no contradiction between the two: he spent long hours in prayer and then long hours meeting human needs.

From Jesus I learn that God is on the side of the sufferer.

Somehow, that "faith" was what God valued, and it soon became clear that faith was the best way for humans to express a love for God.

Does prayer change God or change me?

Christianity is not a purely intellectual, internal faith. It can only be lived in community.

we persevere because we believe rewards will come.

A cease-fire between human beings depends upon a cease-fire with God.

Faith, I've concluded, means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.

From Jesus I learn that, whatever activism I get involved in, it must not drive out love and humility, or otherwise I betray the kingdom of heaven.

Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.7-22 REINHOLD NIEBUHR