Quotes About God

When you seek to define who you are through those relationships, you are actually asking another sinner to be your personal messiah, to give you the inward rest of soul that only God can give. Only when I have sought my identity in the proper place (in my relationship with God) am I able to put you in the proper place as well. When I relate to you knowing that I am God's child and the recipient of his grace, I am able to serve and love you.

We think, How much better life would be if a certain situation or a relationship were different! Meanwhile, God says that what needs change most is us! He does not just work to fix situations and relationships; he is intent on rescuing us from ourselves. We are the focus of his loving, lifelong work of change.

Remember, your relationships have not been designed by God as vehicles for human happiness, but as instruments of redemption.

The decision to forgive is first a heart transaction between you and God. It is a willingness to give up your desire to hold onto (and in some way punish the person for) his offense against you. Instead, you entrust the person and the offense to God, believing that he is righteous and just. You make a decision to respond to this person with an attitude of grace and forgiveness.

Words separate you from the rest of creation, making you more like God than like animals.

When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.

Conflict with others is one of God's mysterious, counterintuitive ways of rescuing us from ourselves. God uses it to get us where he wants to take us before we die. Because we don't usually think that trials can be used in such a positive way, this truth catches us by surprise. But it shouldn't.

We are fallen dreamers, who dream of better worlds than the one in which we live. But the dreams we envision are often more about our own agenda than they are about our Lord's. Though we may not be aware of it, we are often at odds with our wise and loving Lord. The change he is working on is not the change we dream about. We dream about change in it—a person or circumstance—but God is working in the midst of it to change us.

Human marriage is only an illustration of our union with Christ. God ordained marriage to help us understand what it means to be in relationship with him.

Does it surprise you that God presents himself as a model for human community?

The order is essential: I am a new creation, accepted, adopted, and free; therefore I want to please God.

Our relationships must be shaped not by what we want, but by what God intends.

Sin's self-centeredness cuts us off from God and others

That evening in the grocery store parking lot, my problem was not just that I didn't love my family as I should. My problem was that I didn't love God as I should.

God will dwell in community with his people so that they can know community with one another

The perfect, eternal love relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit was ripped apart to allow us to be restored to God and reconciled to one another.

What does all this biblical and experiential data tell us? That you cannot talk about human beings made in God's image without talking about relationships. Yet it is often the first thing we overlook. Only when human beings live in community do we fully reflect the likeness

The Bible reminds us that God wants—and deserves—to be the defining center of both these things. When I live out of a biblical sense of who I am (identity) and rest in who God is (worship), I will be able to build a healthy relationship with you. These are not abstract theological concepts. We're talking about the content and character of our hearts.

John Calvin said, "For errors can never be uprooted from human hearts until a true knowledge of God is planted therein." 5

The circle of human community is only healthy when it exists within the larger circle of community with God.

Who you tell yourself you are has a very powerful impact on the way you deal with the big and small issues of daily life. In the same way, where you find your identity will have everything to do with how you respond to the hard work of relationships with others. Either I get my identity vertically, out of my sense of who God is and worship who he has made me in Christ, or I will seek to get my identity horizontally, out of my circumstances, relationships, and successes.

Our experience of reconciling grace is expressed every time we pool our resources for the kingdom of God.

When God's wise and loving rule over you is replaced with self-rule, other people become your subjects.

Look at your relationship to money. What does it tell you about your relationship to God?