Quotes About Holiness

The holy scriptures as well as the local and General Authorities of the Church provide a safety net of counsel and guidance for the people of the Church.

Silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.

philosophy is not suited for the masses, what they need is holiness.

Dr. Francis Collins, was impressed with the moral argument on his way back to God. He later wrote, "After twenty–eight years as a believer, the Moral Law still stands out for me as the strongest signpost to God. More than that, it points to a God who cares about human beings, and a God who is infinitely good and holy.

When you believe you reflect what is holy and good, you can see more that is good in every stage of your life. (319)

When spiritual friends share their stories, the others listen without working. They rest. There's nothing to fix, nothing to improve. A spiritual community feels undisturbed quiet as they listen, certainly burdened . . . but still resting in the knowledge that the life within, the passion for holiness, is indestructible. It needs only to be nourished and released.

We'll never abandon ourselves to the Spirit as long as we think we can change without Him.

We can't earn our way into God's favor by meticulously following a moral code — even a biblical one. Our deeds will never be righteous enough. God's standard of holiness is way beyond our best efforts.

The forest, far from the mundane and familiar world of the city, provides the appropriate setting for exceptional figures, both holy and mythic. Here, as in the world landscapes, figures and settings are truly matched; and as Reindert Falkenburg and myself have argued, the remoteness and grand scale of the forest or the earlier mountain wilderness signal the sanctity of or gravity of the human scene, however small in scale, which the discerning viewer must seek out and read as significant.

The Qumran texts are also of interest in reflecting a preference for the expressions "Holy Spirit" and "Spirit of Holiness

where Paul first refers to "the Spirit of holiness" as involved in Jesus' resurrection (v. 4), and then to serving God "with my spirit [in] the gospel of his Son" (v. 9 NRSV).

Paul identifies "those who belong to Christ" as summoned and enabled now to live and be guided by the Spirit (Gal 5:24-25).

They teach us that we must shed our false self and allow our true self to emerge. This journey toward holiness takes us deep into our inner desert. The desert is too hot a place in which to carry our emotional and spiritual excess baggage, so we begin to let go rather than continue carrying the burden. Our desert begins to remove the excess we did not know was there.

The Prophets, Evliyas and Sheikhs are spiritual 'gravity wells.' They become so 'heavy' because they carry Allah (the Awareness of the Entire Universe) within themselves. This is why these Holy Ones draw others toward them.

He taught them that the purpose of a man is to make his life holy--every aspect of his life: eating, drinking praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly.

A Christian of longer standing may not be spiritual, not because he has had insufficient time but because during the years of his Christian life he has not allowed the Holy Spirit to control him.

It is more important to be than to do, for if I am what God wants me to be, then I will do what He wants me to do. If I try to promote a program, however well-meaning, without personal holiness, it will be tainted by the defects of my life. It may lack the direction of full knowledge of the Word, or the discernment of maturity, or the direction that comes through unclouded fellowship with the Lord. Primarily we do not need to develop programs, but people.

It is time for us Christians to face up to our responsibility for holiness. Too often we say we are "defeated" by this or that sin. No, we are not defeated; we are simply disobedient. It might be well if we stopped using the terms "victory" and "defeat" to describe our progress in holiness. Rather we should use the terms "obedience" and "disobedience.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

They have been fulfilled in Christ, so we must determine their theological purposes and apply them to current situations. We need holiness and a proper relationship with God just as they did, and the legal regulations properly understood can help us center on those critical areas of the Christian life.

Just as the Son delights in the holy law of His Father, even so the Spirit of God promotes the law as the pattern of our sanctification. Neither the Son nor the Spirit can be placed in opposition to the Father's law; if this were not so the unity of the Trinity would be dissolved.

The yogic scriptures paint a picture of perfection, and perfection can be your aim, but I can tell you sad stories about myself and others who have entered into a state of premature holiness with unpleasant consequences.

All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all. Cecil Frances Alexander 1818-1895

Perception bestows blessing—as the stories sketched in this chapter attempt to demonstrate. Perception brings into being and maintains the being of whatever is perceived; and when perception sees in "the holiness of the Heart's affections," again as these stories say, things are revealed that prove the Truth of the Imagination.