Quotes About Faith

The spiritual starvation diet offered by secularism made people so hungry that they now eat anything.

Precisely because the resurrection has happened as an event within our own world, its implications and effects are to be felt within our own world, here and now.

Far too much traditional church has consisted of too much tradition and not enough church.

People who believe that Jesus is already Lord and that he will appear again as judge of the world are called and equipped (to put it mildly) to think and act quite differently in the world from those who don't.

Among other beliefs, I hold more firmly than ever to the conviction that serious study of Jesus and the gospels is best done within the context of a worshipping community.

Following Jesus means denying yourself, saying 'no' to the things that you imagine make up your 'self', and finding to your astonishment that the 'self' you get back is more glorious, more joyful than you could have imagined.

When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. One of the primary laws of human life is that you become like what you worship; what's more, you reflect what you worship not only back to the object itself but also outward to the world around.

He might have been a wafer in the hands Of priests this day, or music from the lips: Of red-robed choristers, instead he slips Away from church, shakes off our linen bands To don his apron with a nurse: he grips And lifts a stretcher, soothes with gentle hands The frail flesh of the dying, gives them hope, Breathes with the breathless, lends them strength to cope.

Think of Oscar Wilde's wonderful scene in his play Salome, when Herod hears reports that Jesus of Nazareth has been raising the dead. "I do not wish him to do that," says Herod. "I forbid him to do that. I allow no man to raise the dead. This man must be found and told that

those who invoke YHWH as the judge of all must themselves live in the light of that coming judgment.

But over against this downplaying or mocking we also see, from the earliest documents of the New Testament right on through the first five or six centuries of church history, the resolute affirmation of the cross not as an embarrassing episode best left on the margins, but as the mysterious key to the meaning of life, God, the world, and human destiny.

it is possible to allow the study of the text, and of different interpretations of the text, to become a substitute for allowing the text to bring us into the presence of the living God.

Perhaps, indeed, that is what "holy scripture" really is — not a calm, serene list of truths to be learned or commands to be obeyed, but a jagged book that forces you to grow up in your thinking as you grapple with it.

Jews may face martyrdom (not least because they refuse to privatize their faith), but they are committed to being good [162] citizens even under a regime at best penultimate and at worst blasphemous.

our confidence is not in the solidity of Western culture or the basic goodness of modern democracy. Our confidence is in Jesus and him alone.

Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Spirit, will be reaffirmed in the eventual future, in ways at which we can presently only guess. RESURRECTION:

The kingdoms of the world run on violence. The kingdom of God, Jesus declared, runs on love. That is the good news.

the famous opening of the central poem in the book of Isaiah stresses comfort: "Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.

In the Lord, your labour is not in vain: what you do here in faith will stand, will last.

God will download our software onto his hardware until the time when he gives us new hardware to run the software again.25

Read John 14:1-31. Why does Jesus feel the need to reassure the disciples at this point (v. 1)? 2. What bold claim does Jesus make about himself in verse 6? 3. Why does this kind of claim often make people uncomfortable?

there is no such thing as a god's-eye view (by which would be meant a Deist god's-eye view) available to human beings, a point of view which is no human's point of view.

The destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians in 587 BC had been the worst possible disaster, indicating that Israel's God had abandoned his house, had left the Temple and city to their long-deserved fate. That was the verdict of Ezekiel, and it is echoed by other writers of the period. But that could not be the end of the story. God had promised to come back. He had promised one final great Passover. One day, when he returned, his people would be free forever.

Private spiritual growth and ultimate salvation come rather as the byproducts of the main, central, overarching purpose for which God has called and is calling us.