Quotes About Spirituality

We're made of dust and we come from the stars, we're both skin and soul, blood and being— at 98.6 degrees continually radiating about 100 watts of energy into our surroundings, containing 7 × 1018 joules of potential energy, the equivalent of 30 large hydrogen bombs.

The Bible is a library of books reflecting how human beings have understood the divine.

The poet wants us to know that God is looking for partners, people to help co-create the world.

The question, then, the art, the task, the search, the challenge, the invitation is for you and me to become more and more the kind of people who are aware of the divine presence, attuned to the ruach

It's possible to resist the very growth and change and expanding consciousness that God desires for you by appealing to your religious convictions.

gospel that has as its chief message avoiding hell or not sinning will never be the full story. A gospel that repeatedly, narrowly affirms and bolsters the "in-ness" of one group at the expense of the "out-ness" of another group will not be true to the story that includes "all things and people in heaven and on earth.

It often appears that those who talk the most about going to heaven when you die talk the least about bringing heaven to earth right now, as Jesus taught us to pray: "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." At the same time, it often appears that those who talk the most about relieving suffering now talk the least about heaven when we die.

I saw that there's no word for spiritual in the Hebrew scriptures (also called the Old Testament). So basic, and yet so revolutionary. There's no word for spiritual, because to call something spiritual would be to imply that other things aren't. In the Bible, everything is spiritual. All of life.

First, I'm a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God. I realize that for some people, hearing talk about Jesus shrinks and narrows the discussion about God, but my experience has been the exact opposite. My experiences of Jesus have opened my mind and my heart to a bigger, wider, more expansive and mysterious and loving God who I believe is actually up to something in the world.

Heaven comforts, but it also confronts.

saw how in the story about Moses and the burning bush, Moses doesn't take his sandals off because suddenly the ground becomes holy. The ground had been holy the whole time. The story is about Moses becoming aware of it.

read the story in the book of Genesis about Jacob waking up from a dream and saying, Surely God was in this place, and I, I wasn't aware of it. Jacob is waking up from a dream, but he's waking up in a larger sense as well, to the divine presence in all of life.

It's very common to hear talk about heaven framed in terms of who "gets in" or how to "get in." What we find Jesus teaching, over and over and over again, is that he's interested in our hearts being transformed, so that we can actually handle heaven.

What this particular religious system that I was working in did was ever so subtly divide the world up into two spheres Ã¢â'¬Â¦ the spiritual, and then the rest of life. As if spiritual is a dimension of life that some people have, and some don't. As if spiritual means less real than the stuff of everyday life like money and bodies and kids and houses and jobs. As if spiritual is about another time and another place when you die and leave this place.

that matters is how you respond to Jesus. And that answer totally resonates with me; it is about how you respond to Jesus. But it raises another important question: Which Jesus?

First, I'm a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God.

when people object to the idea of God, to the idea that there is more beyond our tangible, provable-with-hard-evidence observations and experiences of the world, they aren't taking the entire world into account.

And now here's the twist, the mystery, the unexpected truth about admitting that takes us back to the counterintuitive power of gospel: When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.

Heaven, for Jesus, wasn't less real, but more real.

And whenever people claim that one group is in, saved, accepted by God, forgiven, enlightened, redeemed- and everybody else isn't- why is it that those who make this claim are almost always part of the group that's in?

As obvious as it is, then, Jesus is bigger than any one religion.

To say it again, eternal life is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of life lived now in connection to God.

He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain and name him, especially the one called "Christianity.

By the way, when the writer John in the book of Revelation gets a current glimpse of the heavens, one detail he mentions about crowns is that people are taking them off [chap. 4]. Apparently, in the unvarnished presence of the divine a lot of things that we consider significant turn out to be, much like wearing a crown, quite absurd.)