Quotes About Spirituality

We do not become less needy, less dependent when we pray; we become more needy, more dependent, which is to say, more human.

In order to pray I have to be paying more attention to God than to what people are saying to me; to God than to my clamoring ego.

Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God—it whets our appetite. Our need for God is not taken care of by engaging in worship—it deepens.

The Holy Spirit's instruments have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they have, it is a pretty sure token that they are NOT His instruments. Nathaniel Hawthorne

Talking to God, I felt, is always better than talking about God; those pious conversations—there's always a touch of self-approval about them. THERESE OF LISIEUX[1] I

Christian spirituality means living in the mature wholeness of the gospel. It means taking all the elements of your life - children, spouse, job, weather, possessions, relationships - and experiencing them as an act of faith. God wants all the material of our lives.

Psalm 131 is a maintenance psalm. It is functional to the person of faith as pruning is functional to the gardener: it gets rid of that which looks good to those who don't know any better, and reduces the distance between our hearts and their roots in God.

But if we take the energies that make for aspiration and remove God from the picture, replacing him with our own crudely sketched self-portrait, we end up with ugly arrogance.

The message of the gospel is that God invades us with new life, and the life changes what we presently are. He is not a means by which we solve problems. He is not a means to avoid problems. He creates new life. He is not a problem solver but a person creator.

Ziklag: for me this became the premier biblical site for realizing that when we get serious about the Christian life, we eventually end up in a place and among people decidedly uncongenial to what we expected. At least uncongenial to what I expected. That place and people is often called a church. It is hard to get over the disappointment that God, having made an exception in my case, didn't seem to call nice, accomplished, courteous, alert people to worship.

It was included in the Songs of Ascents to develop just those aspects of life under God and in Christ which my sometime friend Kelly lacked and which we all need.

And my work is not to fix people. It is to lead people in the worship of God and to lead them in living a holy

Treating souls for whom Christ died as numbers or projects or resources seemed to me something like a sin against the Holy Spirit.

Eugene H. Peterson

Many claim to have been born again, but the evidence for mature Christian discipleship is slim.

Under the image of the Trinity we discover that we do not know God by defining him but by being loved by him and loving in return.

I don't find pastors and professors, for the most part, very interested in matters of formation in holiness. They have higher profile things to tend to.

GOD rewrote the text of my life when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.

Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don't worry about missing out. You'll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.

the reality that was inside of Jesus got outside of him so the disciples could see it.

As we grow into maturity in Christ our distinctiveness is accentuated, not blunted. General directions, useful as they are, don't take into account the details that face us as holiness takes root in the particular social and personal place we are planted.

We know very well that we are not set right with God by rule-keeping but only through personal faith in Jesus Christ.

Prayer is what develops in us after we step out of the center and begin responding to the center, to Jesus.

I had escaped the snare of certitude that I welcomed so avidly at first and entered, via the name of Jesus, the wide and comprehensive company of Jesus.