Quotes About Spirituality

God, what is man's best gift to mankind? To be beautiful of soul and then let people see into your soul.

We pass from thinking of God as part of our life to the realization that we are part of his life.

Darkness is a definite experience of prayer. It is to be expected, even embraced.

It is precisely in the "slop-bucket job"—the work that we abhor—where we will find God the most. We do not need to have good feelings or a warm glow in order to do work for the glory of God. All good work is pleasing to the Father. Even the jobs that seem meaningless and mindless to us are highly valued in the order of the kingdom of God. God values the ordinary.

Martin Luther declares that the life of the Christian should be one of daily repentance. Daily we confess, daily we repent, daily we "turn, turn, 'til we turn 'round right." The Prayer of Tears is the primary aid to our turning.

God wants us to be present where we are. He invites us to see and to hear what is around us and, through it all, to discern the footprints of the Holy.

Life with God will overflow any attempts to compartmentalize or contain it. It is not just for those who are 'spiritually inclined.' We are made to live with God at the very center of our lives, transforming our thoughts, actions, decisions, relationships, vocations, communities, and social structures.

As Richard Foster explains, "Though silence sometimes involves the absence of speech, it always involves the act of listening. Simply to refrain from talking, without a heart listening to God, is not silence."1

Through prayer and study, worship and service, we regularly digest God's word into the core of our being, where it feeds and transforms us. Continue

Today, O Lord, I yield myself to you. May your will be my delight today. May your way have perfect sway in me. May your love be the pattern of my living. —Richard J. Foster, Prayers from the Heart12

In his excellent little book entitled Freedom from Sinful Thoughts Heini Arnold writes, "We…want to make it quite clear that we cannot free and purify our own heart by exerting our own 'will.'"3

The primary purpose of prayer is to bring us into such a life of communion with the Father that, by the power of the Spirit, we are increasingly conformed to the image of the Son.

The offering of ourselves can only be the offering of our lived experience, because this alone is who we are. And who we are—not who we want to be—is the only offering we have to give. We give God therefore not just our strengths but also our weaknesses, not just our giftedness but also our brokenness.

Jesus did not all of a sudden one day start spouting nice sayings about God. No, when he began his public ministry, he was speaking out of a life that had been tested and tried.

As worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience. Holy obedience saves worship from becoming an opiate, an escape from the pressing needs of modern life.

John Havel, a seventeenth-century English Puritan, noted that the "greatest difficulty in conversion, is to win the heart to God; and the greatest difficulty after conversion, is to keep the heart with God. . .

Superficiality is the curse of our age.

genuinely long for abilities that are beyond yourself in order to face the demands of everyday life patiently and wisely. You—I—we—would love to have the inner resources to replace deep, destructive habits of thought with even deeper, life-giving habits of mind and heart and spirit.

In the quiet of those brief hours, listen to the thunder of God's silence.

Once we have made generous latitude for individual differences and schedules, we must firmly discipline ourselves to a regular pattern of prayer. We cannot assume that time will somehow magically appear. We will never have time for prayer—we must make time. On this score we have to be ruthless with our rationalizations. We must never, for instance, excuse our prayerlessness under the guise of "always living prayerfully.

we are not just saved by grace; we live by grace. And we pray by grace and fast by grace and study by grace and serve by grace and worship by grace.

In Celebration of Discipline Richard Foster makes a distinction between self-righteous service and true service. Self-righteous service flows out of human effort and goals; true service flows out of God and love.6

To pray is to change. Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer as a noticeable characteristic of our lives.

Solitude is both a "vacation with God" and a "furnace of transformation." "The