Quotes About Faith

if God was a woman, she wouldn't have screwed things up this badly.

Perhaps more important, religion provides our species' longest and deepest struggle to make sense of suffering, including suffering that is unchosen.

Stephen Prothero's God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World speaks directly to this issue. A professor at Boston University, Prothero observes that the claim that all religions are fundamentally the same is an insult to all religions, because they have different benchmarks and different goals and different frameworks and different worldviews.

William Seymour, a key figure in the Azusa Street revivals that birthed the modern Pentecostal movement, came to believe, according to Harvey Cox, that "the truest sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit was not speaking in tongues but the demise of racial barriers between Christians.."Z6

We met Bautista several years ago. His amazing testimony of conversion to Christ, after being the shaman for a village of Yanomamo people in southern Venezuela, graphically taught us about the reality of spiritual warfare in the world.20

When we engage with people from the Majority World church, many of whose lives are characterized by hardship and suffering, they ask us, not unlike Thomas asked of Jesus, "Show us your scars, and then we'll believe that you understand the same gospel that we've embraced.

though the Western world has dominated Christianity for much of Christian history, Christianity is now primarily a nonwhite, non-Western, nonwealthy religion.

A veteran leader of an agency working among Muslims read my report, and he reflected: "The Nigerians remind me of how older generations went out. Today, I spend hours and hours on evacuation policies, hostage policies, and insurance policies. In the old days, we just went and died.

For many of us, following Jesus in this world will not require literally dying. But it might require downsizing our lifestyle. It might mean taking vacation time to go on a short-term mission trip when we could be just relaxing. In any case, it's all about identifying with Jesus and saying, in light of the Great Salvation, "Jesus, I want to go where you're going and where you want to bring me.

The world we live in includes two Great Divides. Economically, the rich-poor divide calls us to lives of generosity. Theologically, the ways that we understand God and faith calls us to a globally expanded view of God.

From some vantage points, the global church seems to be getting more fragmented, like the description of the people of Israel in the age of the Judges, when "everyone did as they saw fit" (Judg 21:25).

The pluralistic spirit of the age challenges the very raison d'etre of mission in a globalized world. If Jesus is not the only way, how does that affect our desire to go to dangerous, difficult places and into hardship situations? In the face of global pluralism, the church must proclaim Jesus Christ with theological integrity, critical contextualization and countercultural preaching.

Security is a false God. Begin to make sacrifices to it and you are lost.

Worry is spiritual short sight. Its cure is intelligent faith.

When it seems humanly impossible to do more in a difficult situation, surrender yourself to the inner silence and thereafter wait for a sign of obvious guidance or for a renewal of inner strength.

Saint John of the Cross gave the following advice: "Enter into your heart and labour in the presence of God who is always present there to help you. Fix your loving attention upon Him without any desire to feel or hear anything of God.

The divinity is there, within you; have faith that it is so and entrust yourself to it.

How can he have fears for his future who knows that he is related to God, and that God is the same yesterday, and today, and forever?

The secret is to remember the Overself, to turn the battle over to IT. Then, what he is unable to conquer by himself, will be easily conquered for him by the higher power.

There comes a stage, whether in meditation or in the ordinary daily experience of life, at which he has to cross over from doing, trying, and managing things by his own self alone and when he can let go and open himself to the higher force--when he can submit his ego to its ordinances, its commands, or to its whispers.

Be still, and know that I am God," sings the Biblical Psalmist. This simply means that the movement of thoughts and emotions is to be brought to an end by entering the deepest degree of contemplation. The same teaching is given in the Bhagavad Gita. "As the wick of an oil lamp placed in a wind-free spot is flickerless, so is the yogi of mastered mind who practises union with the God-Self.

When Jesus told John the Baptist, "Perform this baptism on Me," John the Baptist replied, "Yes Sir, I will do so.

by being baptized by John the Baptist, shedding His blood by dying on the Cross, and through this saved all the sinners of the world from their sins.

sins completely by understanding and believing in the gospel of the water and the Spirit. Jesus has enabled us to realize why He had to be baptized by John the Baptist, and because His baptism, He had to shed His blood by dying on the Cross. It is only when we reach this correct understanding of the gospel Truth that we can truly be saved and become God's own people.