Quotes About God

God had "hallowed" creation by separating the sacred from the profane, the clean from the unclean. Jesus did not cancel out the hallowing principle, rather he changed its source. We ourselves can be agents of God's holiness, for God now dwells within us. In the midst of an unclean world we can stride, as Jesus did, seeking ways to be a source of holiness.

In a sort of negative proof of the power of prayer, three times God commanded Jeremiah to stop praying; God wanted no alteration in his plans to punish a rebellious nation.

Nosotros, sin Dios, no podemos. Dios, sin nosotros, no quiere», decía San Agustín.

El problema de Dios no es que no sea capaz de hacer ciertas cosas. Su problema es que él ama. El amor le complica la vida a Dios, como se la complica a cualquiera"1.

AS ANDREW GREELEY SAID, If one wishes to eliminate uncertainty, tension, confusion and disorder from one's life, there is no point  in getting mixed up either with Yahweh or with Jesus of Nazareth.7-9 I grew up expecting that a relationship with God would bring order, certainty, and a calm rationality to life. Instead, I have discovered that living in faith involves much dynamic tension.

Where is God when it hurts? Where God's people are. Where misery is, there is the Messiah, and now on earth the Messiah takes form in the shape of the church. That's what the body of Christ means.

the New Testament holds up the model of a church whose activities exist primarily for the sake of outsiders. What keeps us from becoming the church God had in mind?

God loves each one of us as if there was only one of us to love, said Augustine.

If I take Easter as the starting point, the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those whom he loves, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality.

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist; that the soul should be joined to the body, and that we should have no soul; that the world should be created, and that it should not be created . . . BLAISE PASCAL1

All through the Bible, especially in the Prophets, we see a conflict raging within God. On the one hand God passionately loved the people he had made; on the other hand, God had a terrible urge to destroy the evil that enslaved them. On the cross, God resolved that inner conflict, for there God's Son absorbed the destructive force and transformed it into love. Disappointment with God

Prayer means keeping company with God who is already present.

That is the kind of shocking accessibility conveyed in Jesus' word Abba. God may be the Sovereign Lord of the Universe, but through his Son, God has made himself as approachable as any doting human father.

A human being is not someone who once in a while makes a mistake, and God is not someone who now and then forgives. No, human beings are sinners and God is love.

All suffering is suffering. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as "the sum of the world's suffering," an abstraction of the philosophers. There are simply individual people who hurt. And who wonder why God permits it.

To pray is to walk in the full light of God, and to say simply, without holding back, 'I am human and you are God.

We do not pray to tell God what he does not know, nor to remind him of things he has forgotten. He already cares for the things we pray about... He has simply been waiting for us to care about them with him.

Un osado mensaje que encontramos en el libro de Job es que a Dios se le puede decir lo que se desee. Arroje ante él su angustia, su ira, sus dudas, su amargura, su dolor por sentirse traicionado, su desilusión.

God is the ultimate judge of hypocrisy in the church, I decided; I would leave such judgment in God's capable hands. I began to relax and grow softer, more forgiving of others. After all, who has a perfect spouse, or perfect parents or children? We do not give up on the institution of family because of its imperfections—why give up on the church?

La fidelidad implica aprender a confiar que, más allá del perímetro de la oscuridad, Dios aún reina y no nos ha abandonado, no importa lo que parezca.

We should leave a worship service asking ourselves not "What did I get out of it?" but rather "Was God pleased with what happened?

The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.

Taken as a whole, the Bible clearly puts the emphasis on what pleases God—the point of worship, after all. To worship, says Walter Wink, is to remember Who owns the house.

We may be abominations, but we are still God's pride and joy. All of us in the church need "grace-healed eyes" to see the potential in others for the same grace that God has so lavishly bestowed on us.