Quotes About God

Deciding to fill our minds with God is how we keep our hearts. To listen to his Word and nourish our whole beings with it is not a nice thing we might do occasionally. Our very lives depend upon it.

But—for good reasons rooted deeply in the nature of the person and of personal relationships—his preferred way is to speak, to communicate: thus the absolute centrality of scripture to our discipleship. And this, among other things, is the reason why an extensive use of solitude and silence is so basic for growth of the human spirit, for they form an appropriate context for listening and speaking to God.1

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.

When the prophet Samuel was a young boy, Eli the priest gave him unerring advice on listening for the voice of God. It is a simple but profound prayer: "Speak, LORD, for Your servant hears" (1 Sam. 3:9). When we get up out of bed in the morning, among our first thoughts should be this: Lord, speak to me. I'm listening. I want to hear your voice.

Prayer, it is rightly said, is the method of genuine theological research, the method of understanding what and who God is.

If you bury yourself in Psalms, you emerge knowing God and understanding life.

I remember a time I went to him with a more personal problem: "Hey Dallas, my heart is breaking, I can't fix it, I don't understand it, and I'm sadder than I've ever been in my life." There was a long pause. With Dallas there's always a long pause. And then he said, "This will be a test of your joyful confidence in God.

Train yourself to use each change of person or event to remind you to pray and to bless, so that mere change becomes a signal to turn your mind back to God.

Satan is our chief enemy, and his primary target is our knowledge of and trust in God.

Satan is our chief enemy, and his primary target is our knowledge of and trust in God. Satan's constant assault is aimed at our belief in God's goodness and power, that God will supply all our needs, and that we can trust God to be sufficient in all ways.

What makes the language great and provides the emotional lift is chiefly its picture of God and of life. We learn from the psalms how to think and act in reference to God. We drink in God and God's world from them. They provide a vocabulary for living Godward, one inspired by God himself. They show us who God is, and that expands and lifts and directs our minds and hearts.

two main things that will block or hinder a life constantly interactive with God and healthy growth in the kingdom. These are the desire to have the approval of others, especially for being devout, and the desire to secure ourselves by means of material wealth.

That spiritual place within us from which outlook, choices, and actions come has been formed by a world away from God. Now it must be transformed.

What my life really is even now is "hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3:3). What I "treasure" in heaven is not just the little that I have caused to be there. It is what I love there and what I place my security and happiness in there. It is God who

And where people do not want to know God, he usually allows them to be without him—at least for a while. When desire conflicts with reality, sooner or later reality wins.

But for all of the soul's vastness and independence, the tiny executive center of the person—that is, the spirit or will—can redirect and re-form the soul, with God's cooperation. It mainly does this by redirecting the body in spiritual disciplines and toward various other types of experiences under God.

There are two Gods," Tolstoy once said. "There is the God that people generally believe in—A God who has to serve them (sometimes in very refined ways, say by merely giving them peace of mind). This God does not exist. But the God whom people forget—the God whom we all have to serve—exists, and is the prime cause of our existence and of all that we perceive."3

those who understand Jesus and his Father know that provision has been made for them. Their confidence has been confirmed by their experience. Though they work, they do not worry about things "on earth." Instead, they are always "seeking first the kingdom." That is, they "place top priority on identifying and involving themselves in what God is doing and in the kind of rightness [dikaiosune] he has. All

You will consume much more grace by leading a holy life than you will by sinning, because every holy act you do will have to be upheld by the grace of God.

And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed" (2 Corinthians 9:8).

Unlike egotism, the drive to significance is a simple extension of the creative impulse of God that gave us being. It is not filtered through self-consciousness any more than is our lunge to catch a package falling from someone's hand. It is outwardly directed to the good to be done. We were built to count, as water is made to run downhill. We are placed in a specific context to count in ways no one else does. That is our destiny.

contemporary wording of Jesus's comparison of God's kind of love, agape, and what normally passes for love might be "What's so great if you love those who love you? Terrorists do that! If that's all your 'love' amounts to, God certainly is not involved. Or suppose you are friendly to 'our kind of people.' So is the Mafia!" (Matthew 5:46–47).

Anger and condemnation like vengeance, are safely left to God. We must beware of believing that it is okay for us to condemn as long as we are condemning the right things. It is not so simple as all that. I can trust Jesus to go into the temple and drive out those who were profiting from religion, beating them with a rope. I cannot trust myself to do so.