Quotes About Spirituality

Be not ashamed women, ... You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God.

Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name. And I leave them where they are, for I know that wherever I go, others will punctually come for ever and ever.

I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God - I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.

Reexamine all that you have been told in school, or in church or in any book. Dismiss whatever insults your soul.

God did not give you the Bible to make you a smarter sinner, but rather a holy saint. Application, not knowledge, pleases God.

God meets you where you are, not where you ought to be. When you manifest a heart to seek Him, your sin and error do not stand in His way.

In your heart you know whether you are as close to God as you ought to be; keep your ears open to your conscience, your heart open to God and your eyes in the Word. 1

Absorption of Scripture is an essential counter-balance to the background noise of the world.

Prayer is not merely an occasional impulse to which we respond when we are in trouble: prayer is a life attitude.

In that world where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and the people know no justice or compassion.

But this is real prayer, down and dirty. It is not nice church prayer that refuses to ask anything because we mostly do not believe that prayers are heard or answered.

When a god is fashioned into a golden commodity (or even lesser material); divine subject becomes divine object, and agent becomes commodity.

prophetic preaching can take place only where the preacher is deeply embedded in the YHWH narrative.

Prophecy cannot be separated very long from doxology, or it will either wither or become ideology. Abraham

Relationship with God is not immune to the surprises and costs of our daily life.

The most remarkable observation one can make about this interface of exilic circumstance and scriptural resource is this: Exile did not lead Jews in the Old Testament to abandon faith or to settle for abdicating despair, nor to retreat to privatistic religion. On the contrary, exile evoked the most brilliant literature and the most daring theological articulation in the Old Testament.

Nobody is profane or unclean. Nobody can be discounted. Nobody is second-class. Nobody is subject to dismissal. Nobody should be cheap labor. Nobody should suffer systems of violence. Old living is contradicted by the truth of the Spirit. The superstition of superiority is broken. The old distinction of chosenness is placed in question.

paraphrasing 1 Cor. 1:25) that the fictions of God are truer than the facts of men.13

to domesticate God and so to curb the freedom that belongs to this erupting God (Exod. 20:4

Sabbath is the visible acknowledgment that life is not defined by commoditization.

we will not have a politics of justice and compassion unless we have a religion of God's freedom.

So in Psalm 73, when life is inequitable, the speaker is aware of a skewed relationship in which one is less than human: When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was stupid and ignorant; I was like a brute beast toward you. (Ps. 73:21-22; cf. 102:7-8)49