Quotes About Faith

As a full-time paid religious person, I understand the desire to restrict God's work to only those who are formally recognized by our religious institutions. But He's too unpredictable for that.

is a mistake to market God as the answer to our insatiable desires when He was the one who made certain our desires were insatiable in the first place. God is relentless in His pursuit of humanity; He'll use anything and everything to bring

Throughout the Scriptures, the people of God continually succumb to the temptation to draw the boundary lines of faith more narrowly than what God has commanded. God's boundaries are simply broader and wider and higher and deeper than ours, so he calls his followers to be marked by the center--their faith in Jesus Christ--rather than by their boundaries.

God is relentless in His pursuit of humanity; He'll use anything and everything to bring us to the place where we'll acknowledge our need for Him.

God will guide those whose hearts are open to follow.

If you passionately commit yourself to living out his purposes and advancing his kingdom, then God will make sure you live in his will. Trust him that if you are not going in the right direction, he will redirect you. But, I urge you, if you are paralyzed by the idea of the will of God, do something. Doing anything God-honoring is far better than doing nothing at all.

We say to God, 'Show me and I'll believe.' Instead, God says to us, 'Believe, and I'll show you.' This is the life of following Jesus Christ. We say, 'God, show me your will and I'll obey you.' God says, 'Obey me, and I'll show you my will.

Actins, practices, and resources that are sometimes part of pursuing genuine faith are not bad things in themselves. In fact, I believe genuine faith leads to changes in outward behavior... But when the externals become substitutes for the real thing--an authentic relationship with God--they have fallen to the level of empty religion.

Rules and rituals are given to God's people to remind them what God is like and what he's called them to. God's commands are for our good, but they (by themselves) do not make us right with him.

God is not looking for 'more and more' obedience but 'deeper and deeper' obedience. True obedience is of the heart. Externals matter only to the degree that they reflect (and affect) the heart.

The circle of those whom God loves has always been bigger than the circle the church has drawn. That is the scandal of grace.

Saying you believe in something is one thing but living like you believe is often another. If your words and actions disagree, which will more loudly declare your beliefs?

What you believe and what you trust are always revealed in how you live and act.

Trust always reveals itself in behavior. Trust in Jesus is no exception; it involves much more than just mentally agreeing with information about him. Trusting Jesus, like trusting other things, should show up in how we actually live.

The followers of Jesus weren't immediately known as 'Christians.' Instead they were known as followers of the Way--a way of life instituted by Jesus. Following Jesus was understood not as an act of believing but primarily as a way of living.

So much of our teaching on what it means to follow Jesus depends on getting people to do 'spiritual' disciplines: Bible reading, solitude, fasting, service, prayer--these are all necessary and vitally important disciplines. But they are not the only ways we express spirituality, nor are they the only disciplines that are spiritual in nature.

Jesus never called us to be believers--he calls us to be followers who believe. It was so easy for me to be a Christian early on because I thought the whole thing was an exercise in believing. But following Jesus is an exercise in living--because we believe.

Walking with Jesus (otherwise known as discipleship) becomes not a matter of learning to do a bunch of new religious things; rather, it means doing the things I have always done but doing them differently.

The more we grow, the longer we walk with Him, the bigger Jesus should get.

Many of us are religious precisely to keep us from trusting God. We go to church, we give money, and we do all the right things--in the hope that God will never puts us in a position where we actually have to trust him.

How does God grow people? Often by reminding them how big he is and how small we are. By introducing mystery and tension and difficulty into life so that we might be forced to move beyond trusting our faith and religious systems to actually trusting him.

Jesus calls his churches to overcome--to engage and redeem and be victorious over the culture around them--and then shows them what this looks like. This is one of the paradoxes of our faith--that Jesus conquered and overcame through suffering and sacrificial love.

Every time you are obedient to Jesus in faith, you war against the dragon and demonstrate the power and love of God. Loving your enemies, blessing people who insult you--this is not a passive, wishy-washy kind of love; it is violent resistance to the powers that govern this world.

Christ followers need not be threatened by truth outside the Bible, for all truth is a reflection of the Holy Creator God.