Quotes About Faith

To truly encounter Jesus is to be knocked sideways, astonished, overwhelmed. Mild interest means you have not yet met him. —Simon Ponsonby

ourselves to the will of God, not just when it makes

First, we must learn to read the Bible with our heads, in order to understand what is actually, objectively, being said. And second, we must learn to read it with our hearts, in order to experience God's voice through its pages. By carefully studying the Bible, we come to understand what its writers were originally saying. And by prayerfully exploring it, we learn to discern what the Holy Spirit is saying to us now.

Por eso esas palabras de Barth son reconfortantes: Lo que forja a un hombre de oración es que se presente delante de Dios con su petición. Las otras teorías de la oración pueden haber surgido de pensamientos muy profundos y pueden lucir muy bien, pero todas sufren de cierta artificialidad porque carecen de algo simple y concreto: se pierden en las alturas y profundidades donde no hay lugar para el hombre que realmente ora, que simplemente hace una petición.4

God is mobilising an army, but it is a broken army that marches on its knees.

If our prayers for others mean anything at all, they cannot be cloistered away all the time in sanitised environments. Standing in the gap for the oppressed may well mean that it matters where we pray and how we pray, and that our prayers for the poor are worked out very practically.

To be a Christian is to live positively and not destructively, to make ugly things beautiful, and to make chaos meaningful.

Andrew Murray, escritor sudafricano del siglo diecinueve, dijo una vez: "El poder de la oración depende casi en su totalidad de nuestro entendimiento de a quién está dirigida y de lo que decimos".5 Cuando la vida nos hiere, eso es más importante que el hecho de llorar en los brazos de Dios como un niño que se mece en sus brazos, recordando que Él es el primero y principal Abba, el Padre.

Augustine once said that God puts salt on our lips that we may thirst for him. Sometimes it's the salt of our tears.

I'd rather be unhappy and know that God is with me, than be happy, comfortable and unsure of God's presence.

I feel like God is waiting to see if I am waiting. If he just flooded in with answers and guidance right now, I would not have changed; I would not have learned to wait and trust without the answers and without a road map for the future. So I'm kind of glad that God was silent, because I actually want to wait; I want to prove my mettle to God. I don't necessarily want ease and instant anything any more.

God is not a mindless dispenser of demolition techniques; he is looking for relationship with those who dare to trust him against all other odds.

Waiting on God, according to Scripture, is not a passive, vacuous state but rather an active process of asking, seeking and engaging with his Spirit.

prayer without action is just religion in hiding.

God uses young people again and again to help restore and shape the destiny of nations...Young people stand at the heart of the salvation story.

prayer can detonate mission.

I am convinced, however, that our constant activity is fruitless without first making that humble act of kneeling to pray. I am convinced that prayer is not only our greatest privilege, but also our greatest source of power.

Zinzendorf. . .asked God to remind him of Christ's suffering whenever he might be inclined to wander away from his first love.

The most powerful thing that can happen in the place of prayer is that you yourself become the prayer. You leave the prayer room as Jesus's hands and feet on earth. This is what it means to pray continually: to see with the eyes of Jesus and to hear with his ears with every waking moment.

what if the call to pray is a call to bleed as well as to receive blessing?

There's little point in lectio divina without the Holy Spirit's help.

start by calling God 'Father' (Luke 11:2). That's the key to prayer.

Christians read the Bible not as a document from history but as a world into which they enter so that God may meet them there.

Do you still believe in God, Rabbi?", she said at last. His face looked drained and pale. He shook his head from side to side. "I believe in sin," he said and finished his wine. I believe in evil.