Quotes About God

As Dorothy Day put it, "I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.

God is present in the Spirit, who groans wordlessly on our behalf and who speaks in a soft voice to all consciences attuned to him.

Knowledge is passive, intellectual; suffering is active, personal. No intellectual answer will solve suffering. Perhaps this is why God sent his own Son as one response to human pain, to experience it and absorb it into himself.

Whenever I fixate on techniques, or sink into guilt over my inadequate prayers, or turn away in disappointment when a prayer goes unanswered, I remind myself that prayer means keeping company with God who is already present.

when we appeal to God's grace and compassion the fearsome God soon disappears.

There is a simple cure for people who doubt God's love and question God's grace: to turn to the Bible and examine the kind of people God loves.

Only Christianity dares to make God's love unconditional.

Jesus says in effect, 'Do you want to know what it feels like to be God? When one of those two-legged humans pays attention to me, it feels like I just reclaimed my most valuable possession, which I had given up for lost.' To God himself, it feels like the discovery of a lifetime.

grace does not depend on what we have done for God but rather what God has done for us.

Self-sufficiency, which first reared its head in the Garden of Eden, is the most fatal sin because it pulls us as if by a magnet away from God.

In the study of scientific atheism, there was the idea that religion divides people. Now we see the opposite: love for God can only unite.

God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found.

No matter how capable we are, we need God every day, living in us and acting through us. We need his courage and his hope, his love and his companionship. We need his salvation. We can't live without God.

At the heart of sin lies a lack of trust that God intends the best for us.

At times, God's history seems to operate on an entirely different plane than ours...Exodus identifies by name the two Hebrew midwives who helped save Moses' life, but it does not bother to record the name of the Pharaoh ruling Egypt (an omission that has baffled scholars ever since).

The role of a doctor may be the most revealing image in thinking about God and sin. What a doctor does for me physically - guide me toward health - God does for me spiritually. I am learning to view sins not as an arbitrary list of rules drawn up by a cranky Judge, but rather as a list of dangers that must be avoided at all costs - for our own sakes.

En nuestro interior existe una especie de juicio instintivo, según el cual la vida debería ser justa, y de alguna manera, Dios debería estar «haciendo mejor su trabajo" de gobernar este mundo.

What would worship look like if we directed it more toward God than toward our own amusement?

Humility is the real Christian virtue," says Nouwen. "When we come to realize that . . . only God saves, then we are free to serve, then we can live truly humble lives.

that God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God's requirements for a perfect life. If paid on the basis of fairness, we would all end up in hell.

Según el rabino Kushner, Dios se siente tan frustrado, incluso tan indignado con la injusticia de este planeta como cualquier otro, pero carece del poder necesario para cambiar las cosas. Millones de lectores han encontrado consuelo en la descripción que hace Kushner de un Dios que parece compasivo, aunque sea débil.

I remind myself that prayer means keeping company with God who is already present.

Although Jesus' prayers do not offer a foolproof formula, they do give clues as to how God works — and does not work — on this planet. Especially when trouble strikes, we want God to intervene more decisively, but Jesus' prayers underscore God's style of restraint out of respect for human freedom.

Where did our sense of beauty and pleasure come from? That seems to me a huge question—the philosophical equivalent, for atheists, to the problem of pain for Christians. The Teacher's answer is clear: A good and loving God naturally would want his creatures to experience delight, joy, and personal fulfillment. G. K. Chesterton credits pleasure, or eternity in his heart, as the signpost that eventually directed him to God: