Quotes About Relationship

We have the ability and responsibility to keep God present in our minds, and those who do so will make steady progress toward him, for he will respond by making himself known to us.

Specifically, in our attempts to understand how God speaks to us and guides us we must, above all, hold on to the fact that learning how to hear God is to be sought only as a part of a certain kind of life, a life of loving fellowship with the King and his other subjects within the kingdom of the heavens.

People are meant to live in an ongoing conversation with God, speaking and being spoken to.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the first chapter of his wonderful book Life Together, has a discussion of how Christians never meet one-on-one; they always meet under the presence of Christ. That's the way we escape the dreadful habit that human beings have of sizing one another up. Does that identify anything that you are familiar with? It's one of the most dreadful things in human life, and only the love of Christ and the presence of the kingdom can bring us beyond it.

There are three main ways in which God comes before the mind, where we can lose ourselves in love of him. These are, of course, also ways in which we may present God to others, as well as ways by which we individually may seek to fill our minds with him. Through them, the lovely God wins the love of the disciple. He comes to us (1) through his creation, (2) through his public acts on the scene of human history, and (3) through individual experiences of him by ourselves and others.8

The disciplines are practices that change the inner self and its relationship to the "helper" (paraclete), so that we can actually do what we would and avoid what we would not. They of course have no point apart from the serious intent to obey Christ's teaching and follow his example.

God seeks us. The basic nature of God is one of loving community.

Love is a gift from God, who is love. We can seek a gift and we can receive a gift, but we do not perform for a gift. So, when we read passages of Scripture like those above, we must remember that the call to us is not to do as much as it is to receive.

knowledge is a friend of faith, essential to faith and to our relationship with God in the spiritual life.

Jesus is the expression of the love of God for us, and in him we see the many ways God deals with people in mercy and grace.

A day shared with Jesus is a day of continuous conversation. We will learn to hear his voice.

You cannot drift into a life of constant companionship with Jesus

Christ is the only one capable of communicating to and developing within the believer an accurate image and idea of God.

You need to imagine what your day would look like with Jesus at your side—as he will be.

The effect of the rupture that sin created in the relationship between the man and the woman is this: mistrust, anger, and disappointment became the standard quality of human life. Even

The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit. It did not and does not proceed by means of the formation of social institutions and laws, the outer forms of our existence, intending that these would then impose a good order of life upon people who come under their power. Rather, his is a revolution of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another.

our humanity will not by itself prevent us from knowing and interacting with God just as they did.

Job's journey of faith moved from ritual to relationship. He began with what we may call the faith of propriety, moved through the faith of desperation, and finally arrived at the faith of sufficiency—the faith that says, regardless of what happens, "It doesn't matter. I have God, and that is all I need.

The eternal life of which Jesus speaks is not knowledge about God but an intimately interactive relationship with him.

the whole Bible—indeed, the whole of our life before God.

So, C. S. Lewis writes, our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and "trying to carry it out." Rather, "The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to 'inject' His kind of life and thought, His Zoe [life], into you; beginning to turn the tin

Now, Jesus himself was and is a joyous, creative person. He does not allow us to continue thinking of our Father who fills and overflows space as a morose and miserable monarch, a frustrated and petty parent, or a policeman on the prowl.

So prayer is a total activity, incorporating many elements essential to a personal relationship between two persons—persons different from and related to one another as the Father is to his children on earth. But still the heart of prayer is the request.

What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him—trusting only his role as guilt remover. To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that he is right about and adequate to everything.