Quotes About Action

We do not just hear what Jesus said to do and try to do that. Rather, we also notice what he did, and we do that too. We

How to combine faith with obedience is surely the essential task of the church as it enters the twenty-first century.

Union in action with the triune God is Christian spirituality. That is where the life is drawing its substance from God.

The general human failing is to want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy. This is the feature of human character that explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We intend what is right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality.

Divine grace is God acting in our life to accomplish what we cannot do on our own. It informs our being and actions and makes them effective in the wisdom and power of God. Hence, grace is not opposed to effort (our actions) but to earning (our attitude).

Love, as Paul and the New Testament presents it, is not action—not even action with a special intention—but a source of action.

Commitment is not sustained by confusion but by insight. The person who is uninformed or confused will inevitably be unstable and vulnerable in action, thought and feeling.

Put his words into practice and find them to be true.

Preliminary 3: Deciding to Do It

This is the true situation: nothing has power to tempt me or move me to wrong action that I have not given power by what I permit to be in me. And the most spiritually dangerous things in me are the little habits of thought, feeling, and action that I regard as "normal" because "everyone is like that" and it is "only human.

if you sufficiently dismember yourself, you will not be able to do any wrong action. This is the logic by which Jesus reduces the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees to the absurd.

the intention points the way, and then habituated thought and desire must be redirected to support the intention in the moments of action.

confident (con-fide, literally acting "with faith") about who we are and what we are doing. To be with Jesus is to have both.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer forcefully states, "The only proper response to this word which Jesus brings with him from eternity is simply to do it."6

But reliance upon what the Spirit does to us or in us, as indispensable as it truly is, will not by itself transform character in its depths. The action of the Spirit must be accompanied by our response, which, as we have seen, cannot be carried out by anyone other than ourselves.

People perish for lack of knowledge, because only knowledge permits assured access to reality; and reality does not adjust itself to accommodate our false beliefs, errors, or hesitations in action. Life demands a steady hand for good, and only knowledge supplies this. This is as true in the spiritual life as elsewhere.

faith is reliance (trust/confidence) revealed in attitude and action.

Does Jesus only enable me to "make the cut" when I die? Or to know what to protest, or how to vote or agitate and organize? It is good to know that when I die all will be well, but is there any good news for life? If I had to choose, I would rather have a car that runs than good insurance on one that doesn't. Can I not have both?

We cannot behave on the spot as he did and taught if in the rest of our time we live as everybody else does. The on the spot episodes are not the place where we can, even by the grace of God, redirect unchristlike but ingrained tendencies of action toward sudden Christlikeness. Our efforts to take control at that moment will fail so uniformly and ingloriously that the whole project of following Christ will appear ridiculous to the watching world.

Brother Lawrence, who was a kitchen worker and cook, remarks. Our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for God's sake which we commonly do for our own…. It is a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times. We are as strictly obliged to adhere to God by action in the time of action as by prayer in the season of prayer.5

The land promised to them was one of incredible goodness—"flowing with milk and honey," as it is repeatedly described. But it still had to be conquered by careful, persistent, and intelligent human action, over a long period of time.

We can fail to know because we do not want to know - because what would be known would require us to believe and act in ways contrary to what we want.

The discipline of secrecy will help us break the grip of human opinion over our souls and our actions. A discipline is an activity in our power that we do to enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort. Jesus

Such love is holistic, not something one turns on or off for this or that person or thing. Its orientation is toward life as a whole. It dwells on good wherever it may be found, and supports it in action. Love is nourished upon the good and the right and the beautiful.