Quotes About Faith

I did, however, remember a line from a book by Dallas Willard that I had read just recently: "At the beginning of each morning I commit my day to the Lord's care. . . . I have already placed God in charge. I no longer have to manage the weather, airplanes, and other people.

The Bible's teaching on prayer leads overwhelmingly to one conclusion: Prayer changes things.

Not knowing doesn't mean you're condemned to anxiety; rather, not knowing calls for trust, and trust is crucial to good performance. Uncertainty is essential to the game.

Welcome to the human race. It is somehow essential to human life as God has ordained it that we can know the final score of yesterday but not tomorrow. It doesn't mean we're condemned to anxiety. It does mean this: If you're looking for certainty, you've chosen the wrong species. You can walk by faith, but not by sight; not down here.

God wants to be known, but not in a way that overwhelms us, that takes away the possibility of love freely chosen. "God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding and so gives himself away," said Meister Eckhart.

Then MacDonald writes this insightful line: "that the same God who is in us, . . . also is all about us—inside, the Spirit; outside, the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us.

Superstition seeks to use the supernatural for my purposes; faith seeks to surrender to God's purposes. Faith teaches us that there is a Person behind the universe, and that Person responds to communication just as all persons do. Prayer is the primary way we communicate with God, and that's why prayer is so closely associated with seeking and discerning open doors.

Jesus has made God's presence scandalously available to anyone who wants it.

God is not interested in your "spiritual life." God is just interested in your life.

The question is, can a human being hold on to God in the face of suffering? After all, suffering is the test of love.

It only makes sense to ask God for guidance in the context of a life committed to "seeking first the kingdom.

The problem with people, according to Jesus, is not that we are too happy for God's taste, but that we are not happy enough.

And it struck me, in that year, how deeply both faith and doubt are part of my life. We often think of them as opposites. Many books argue for one or the other. But while in some respects they are enemies, in other ways they are surprisingly alike: both are concerned with ultimate issues; both pop up unasked for at unexpected moments; both are necessary. I

Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who doubts sometimes, has written that the reason so many babies keep being born is that God loves stories. Why

He who is alone with his sins is utterly alone. DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

Etty spent her last days giving hope and care, "with a kind word for everyone she met on the way." Her final words were written on a postcard and thrown off Wagon No. 12, the railroad car she rode to what she knew would be her death in Auschwitz. "We left camp singing," she wrote. The Nazis took control of her possessions, her mobility, her work, her family, her body, and finally her life, yet she believed that they did not truly take anything at all.

Dostoyevsky, who was a believer, wrote that the "death of a single infant calls into question the existence of God."1

The character of the faith that allows us to be transformed by suffering and darkness is not doubt-free certainty; rather, it is tenacious obedience.

The boat is safe, secure, and comfortable. On the other hand, the water is rough. The waves are high. The wind is strong. There's a storm out there. And if you get out of the boat—whatever your boat might happen to be—there's a good chance you might sink.

It was around Clifford's era that Thomas Huxley coined the term agnostic, which did not exist before the nineteenth century. Agnostics, Huxley said, "totally refuse to commit" to either denying or affirming the supernatural.

But a philosopher named William James responded that sometimes Clifford's advice is bad strategy. He said doubt is the wrong alternative when three conditions are met: when we have live options, when the stakes are momentous, and when we must make a choice.3

can be "sitting at Jesus feet" when I'm kneeling in prayer or negotiating a contract or fixing my kids lunch or watching a movie. All it requires is my asking him to be my teacher and companion in this moment.

Theologian Lesslie Newbigin writes that we live in an age that favors doubt over faith.4 We often speak of "blind faith" and "honest doubt.

To mortify a sin is not utterly to kill, root it out, and destroy it, that it should have no more hold at all nor residence in our hearts. It is true this is that which is aimed at; but this is not in this life to be accomplished.