Quotes About Spirituality

Where God builds a church, the devil builds a chapel.

You must learn to call on the Lord. Don't sit all alone or lie on the couch, shaking your head and letting your thoughts torture you. Don't worry about how to get out of your situation or brood about your terrible life, how miserable you feel, and what a bad person you are. Instead, say, "Get a grip on yourself, you lazy bum! Fall on your knees, and raise your hands and eyes toward heaven. Read a psalm. Say the Lord's Prayer, and tearfully tell God what you need.

Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.

to call a man without the Holy Spirit "upright and God-fearing" is the same as calling Belial "Christ".

Grant that I may not pray alone with the mouth; help me that I may pray from the depths of my heart.

Thus God's work and His eyes are in the depths, but man's only in the height.

All teachers of Scripture conclude that the essence of prayer is simply the lifting up of the heart to God. But if this is so, it follows that everything else that doesn't lift up the heart to God is not prayer. Therefore, singing, talking, and whistling without this lifting up of your heart to God are as much like prayer as scarecrows in the garden are like people. The name and appearance might be there, but the essence is missing.

Stop your complaining, stop your doctoring; this tumult has arisen and is direct from above, and it will not cease till it makes all the adversaries of the Word like the mud on the streets. But it is sad to have to remind a theologian like you of these things, as if you were a pupil instead of one who ought to be teaching others.

Before you can cry to God and seek him God must come to you and must have found you

Rather than walk about holy places we can thus pause in our thoughts, examine our heart, and visit the wheel promised land.

The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold of me.

All Believers are Priests

We are so blind that we run to God with physical ailments and needs, but for illnesses of the soul we run away from God and are determined not to return until we are cured—as if there were two gods, one to help the body and one to aid the soul, or as if we ourselves could take care of spiritual needs, although they are greater than the physical. This is really a devilish bit of advice and counsel.

We aren't condemning good works. People first have to be made ready to do good works by being born anew. Only

Oh, if a man were so to regard himself and his position, and attended to its duties alone, how rich in good works would he be in a short time, so quietly and secretly that no one would notice it except God alone!

Before you pray, check to see whether you believe or doubt that you will be heard. If you are doubting or uncertain, or if you are merely trying a prayer to see what happens, your prayer won't be worth anything.

If every man had faith, we would need no more laws, but every one would of himself at all times do good works, as his confidence in God teaches him.

My temptations have been my masters in divinity.

I do not bother my head with speculations about the nature of God. I simply attach myself to the human Christ

For the Lord does not speak in vain, nor does He offer His Word to the lazy and smug, but to those who are in need, who toil, who are afflicted and are undergoing a very difficult conflict against the flesh and all external appearances, that is, against those things which according to human sense and reason fight against faith, as Heb. 11 says, so that the afflicted can rely on the sole protection of the Word of God and be sustained by it.

For more than twenty years I was a pious monk, read Mass daily, and so weakened myself with fasting and praying that I would not have been long for this life had I continued. Yet all this taken together cannot help me in even one little crisis to be able to say before God: 'All this I have done, now please consider it, and be gracious to me.' What else did I achieve with this than to plague myself uselessly, impair my health, and waste my time?

We must pray and do our daily work, but everything we do must flow from faith.

The Holy Spirit is no sceptic, and the things He has written in our hearts are not doubts or opinions, but assertions - surer and more certain than sense and life itself.

For all our life should be baptism, and the fulfilling of the sign, or sacrament, of baptism; we have been set free from all else and wholly given over to baptism alone