Quotes About Faith

Michael J. Fox

A lighthouse...speaks to the guiding nature of hope. By equal turns, it illuminates and darkens, so the way forward can be chosen in the light, and trusted in the darkness.

Don't worry about him," Nana would assure them. "Michael will do more in his life than you can ever imagine.

I've dropped my pebble in the ocean, and hopefully; throughout the course of the day; millions of others will drop theirs in too. No single one of us knows which pebble causes the wave to crest, but each of us, quite rightly, believes that it might be ours; an act of faith.

Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope.

Hope is informed optimism

With gratitude, optimism is sustainable.

That painter who has no doubts will achieve little." – LEONARDO DA VINCI

Faith, for Paul, is a death experience, a death that creates life.

Those who respond in trust or faith to the faith of Christ are moved into Christ, into the sphere of his life. In that sphere, and there alone, is justification to be found. Simultaneously, those who move into Christ find that Christ has moved into them, so to speak.

Faith, therefore, is a liberation that is also an incorporation, specifically an incorporation into Christ the new lord, and into his body.

faith is an inauguration into a community and into a life of dying, or cruciformity.

Faith, then, for Paul is first of all cruciform participation with Christ that liberates participants from the hostile powers that rule human existence and brings them into the powerful sphere of Christ's benevolent lordship and community.

faith is an initial and ongoing participation in the faith (i.e., faithful death) of Jesus.

Faith begins by acknowledging the faith of Jesus and dying with him by no longer relying on the law and the self for right relations with God. Faith continues by daily relying on Christ as the energizing force for all of life, and by allowing the faith of the Son of God, expressed in his self-giving, loving death, to reexpress itself in the life of the believer

for Paul private belief and public confession of it - including baptism - go hand in hand.3 Both are needed for salvation.

Paul's act of faith has enabled him to share in the faith of Jesus, the faith that expressed itself in self-giving love.

Holiness is not a supplement to justification but the actualization of justification,

for Paul the cross is the quintessential, unified act of loyalty to God and love for others—what Paul, like Jesus, understands to be the essence of the Jewish Law, the covenant obligations for God's people to love God and neighbor.8 This perspective will form the foundation of Paul's understanding of the appropriate human response to the gospel—a unified response of faith and love—as God's way of forming a (new) covenant community.

This is all birthed and nurtured in worship.

Faith is a separation from the law ("I died to the law") and the self ("It is no longer I who live"), and an identification with the cross of Christ ("I have been crucified").

As the twentieth-century theologian Emil Brunner put it, "The Church exists by mission, just as a fire exists by burning. Where there is no mission there is no Church. . . ."24

Nearly one-third of Acts recounts Paul on trial or in prison, and in five of the thirteen letters he is identified as a prisoner of, or in, Christ (never mentioning Roman authorities!):

by "responsible" I mean theologically responsible, which entails paying attention to the book's original historical and literary contexts, its relationship to the rest of Scripture, its relationship to Christian doctrine and practice, and its potential to help or harm people in their life of faith.