Quotes About Spirituality

To open the Bible is to open a window toward Jerusalem, as Daniel did (6:10), no matter where our exile may have taken us.

After defending the value of prepared prayers, the author cautions against over-reliance on them. Just as David could not fight in the armor of King Saul, we are called to fight in the way God has equipped us uniquely.

If the Bible is not simply "revelation," neither is it simply a devotional aid, even the primary devotional aid.

In a sense, learning to follow Jesus is simply learning to pray the Lord's Prayer.

Beauty matters, dare I say, almost as much as spirituality and justice.

The meaning of the story is found in every detail, as well as in the broad narrative. The pain and tears of all the years were met together on Calvary. The sorrow of heaven joined with the anguish of earth; the forgiving love stored up in God's future was poured out into the present; the voices that echo in a million human hearts, crying for justice, longing for spirituality, eager for relationship, yearning for beauty, drew themselves together into a final scream of desolation.

Christian holiness consists not of trying as hard as we can to be good but of learning to live in the new world created by Easter, the new world we publicly entered in our baptism. There are many parts of the world we can't do anything about except pray. But there is one part of the world, one part of physical reality, that we can do something about, and that is the creature each of us call "myself.

To enjoy worship for its own sake, or simply out of a cultural appreciation of the 'performance' (whether of Byrd or heavy rock), would be like Moses coming upon the burning bush and deciding to cook his lunch on it.

Paul believed, in fact, that Jesus had gone through death and out the other side. Jesus had gone into a new mode of physicality, for which there was no precedent and of which there was, as yet, no other example.

you become like what you worship;

It is true, then, that as soon as someone becomes a Christian, he or she can and must say `Our Father'; that is one of the marks of grace, one of the first signs of faith. But it will take full Christian maturity to understand, and resonate with, what those words really mean.

How much easier to produce moral musings than present the fresh challenge of the kingdom!

The most important decisions we make in life are not made by post-Enlightenment left-brain rationality alone.

That is our vocation: to be in prayer, perhaps wordless prayer, at the point where the world is in pain.

Human" is a kind of midway creature, reflecting God into the world, and reflecting the world back to God.

how much more ought we to cherish and marvel at the fact that for nearly two thousand years people have prayed this prayer. When you take these words on your lips you stand on hallowed ground.

The Psalms are the steady, sustained subcurrent of healthy Christian living.

Of course, there is a much older notion of "revelation," according to which God is continually revealing himself to and within the world he

The old idea that the goal of Christian existence is simply "going to heaven" doesn't, in fact, do very much to stimulate the fully fledged virtue we find advocated in the New Testament.

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

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.

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.

Holiness is multidimensional.