Christianity Quotes - Page 40

We judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. We need to offer grace to all, because we all need a little grace.

All of Christ’s philosophical ideas can be compressed into one simple phrase – Love thy neighbor.

As a house can be only be built satisfactorily and durably when there is a foundation, and a picture can be painted only when there is something prepared to paint it on, so carnal love is only legitimate, reasonable, and lasting when it is based on the respect and love of one human being for another.

There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world—I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.

The more time that passes without an answer and the longer we wander through the wilderness of silence and shadow, the more fearful we become that maybe God isn't all we have believed him to be. It's in those moments that Satan plants in us the temptation to 'throw away this confident trust in the Lord.' The enemy wants us to forget 'the great reward it brings you' (Hebrews 10:35).

May God give you the grace to do many good deeds.

Just like love becomes consummated upon the attainment of orgasm, all the faith and divinity in the world reach their ultimate existential potential upon the attainment of Absolute Unitary Qualia or simply Absolute Godliness.

One of the greatest lies is to believe that we don’t have value. One of the greatest mistakes is to act on that belief. And the greatest liberation is found in looking at the cross of Christ and realizing the enormity of the lie.

Grace is all that God is free to do for you, in you, with you and through you only because of the finished work of Jesus Christ.

Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.

I’m less interested in proselytizing or a bigger tent for its own sake than in issues of human flourishing. What are the best conditions in which people live and flourish? It’s more the, How do we get along? What does it mean for living now?

May our afflictions be few, but may we learn not to squander them.

We shall do even greater things because the love that lived in the radical Christ now lives within millions of ordinary radicals all over the planet.

Sometimes the fact that you can't sense God isn't an indication that He is not there. It is just an indication that you are hanging out in the wrong place.The cave is not a physical location, it is a state of mind.

What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.

I have concluded that the more we seek the Lord, with a passion for His worthiness, the more we are gripped with our neediness. Adoration cultivates desperation.

The moment the religious population of the world begins to see the prophets what they really were - mortal teachers of the mortal world, a great portion of the world's religious conflicts shall vanish into thin air.

Wonder is the antidote to religion.

And so they easily suppose that this truce, owing to helplessness, is victory and that they have convinced the other man. But in fact, instead of winning him over, they have merely applied a kind of shock therapy — only it was never 'therapy.' They have smothered the first little flame of a man’s own spiritual life and a first shy question with the fire extinguisher of their erudition. By such performances a person can really be smothered and strangled!

I would stand there at times and remember how beautiful God created this world, and then I would be reassured that he would certainly take care of me and all of my loved ones.

Persecution is not an original feature in any religion but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law.

If you are truly able to walk in the shoes of Christ, the very label of religion called Christianity would disappear from the face of earth.

If you are sure that you're going to heaven when you die, you ought to make the most of today. Why live below God's standards when He has so many wonderful things planned for you?

With God, the word ‘impossible’ is itself impossible.

How can we love the unseen God and hate the visible man?

No man's advice can change you unless you speak to yourself. Bible school or seminars can't change you, going to church can't change you except you decide to change.Psalm 139:23 - 24

Single Christians living in purity and community are billboards for the sufficiency of Jesus

A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.

Whoever wishes to be free, shall seek the faith of liberty.

This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.

I don't know why, but the Bible always seems to come to me in my time of need, even with the exact words.

The Bible is a life giving word.

...churches would aim to take people at every age and ability level and help them become the most loving version of themselves possible. They would help people face the challenges of life--challenges that could make them bitter, self-absorbed, callous, or hateful--with openness, courage, and generosity. (p. 54)

Cosmopolitan discourse is in a way a response to the issue of solidarity. Although the precondition for solidarity can be a _community_, solidarity requires more intentional commitment and performance than does community.

Either paganish unbelief of the truth of that eternal blessedness, and of the truth of the Scripture which doth promise it to us; or, at least, a doubting of our own interest; or most usually most sensible of the latter, and therefore complain most against it, yet I am apt to suspect the former to be the main, radical master-sin, and of greatest force in this business. Oh! If we did but verily believe that the promise of the glory is the word of God, and that God doth truly mean as he speaks, and is fully resolved to make it good; if we did verily believe that there is, indeed, such blessedness prepared for believers as the scripture mentioneth ; sure we should be as impatient of living as we are now fearful of dying, and should think every day a year till our last day should come. We should as hardly refrain from laying violent hands on ourselves, or from the neglecting of the means of our health and life, as we do now from over-much carefulness and seeking of life by unlawful means. . . . Is it possible that we can truly believe that death will remove us fro misery to such glory, and yet be loth to die(465-6)?It appears we are little weary of sinning, when we are so unwilling to be freed by dying(467).

And who did she have? The thought caught her up short, but then she smiled, remembering the preacher's words. She had the Lord. He was her foundation, and that was enough.

People who say we are just preaching "extreme grace" must not understand how extremely gracious our Father is.

The first good news for all of us, the first joyful story of our lives, is that there is a story at all, and an Author who has loved us into being.

From imperial, economic and ideological causes, many cultures are the inheritors, and hence the prisoners, of attitudes of scorn and disdain for other faiths – outlooks which are not ennobling to anyone.

Do you know that you can be surrounded by all these blessings, all these relationships, goodness, provisions, opportunities? But if you don't know how to turn the blessing into praise, it will turn into pride and your life will never be filled with joy because your heart has holes in it.

I wonder if anyone who needs a snappy song service can really appreciate the meaning of the cross.

Salvation is sanctification of soul by the Blessed Saviour.

A man ought to pray daily for himself, his wife, his children and his family.

People, most especially those who have known ease in this life, care more about being prospered than refined. It's always about what they can get from God, not what they can do for others, unless they can call attention to it for others to see.

Rebirth is neither born of blood nor flesh or human origin. But born of God.

In many instances, the failures of my greatest schemes ultimately lead to the fulfillment of my greatest successes. Therefore, God will allow our most cherished dreams to perish so that we might turn and seek out His most cherished plans.

If Miss Watson had told Huck what the Bible says about living in a resurrected body and being with people we love on a resurrected Earth with gardens and rivers and mountains and untold adventures--now that would have gotten his attention.

If you love someone, you will want to understand them and accept them as they grow and change; similarly, loving yourself involves a never-ending process of self-understanding and self-acceptance through life's ups and downs...we are finally coming to understand that love for neighbor and love for self naturally lead to love for the earth...if you love your neighbor as yourself, you want both them and you to be able to breathe, so you need to love clean fresh air...you want them and you to be able to drink, so you need to love pure water in all its forms...you want them and you to be be able to eat, so you need to care about the climate...." (p. 59-60)

She didn't think she could be a Christian if perfection was required.

So much can change from one day to the next, but the one thing that always remains the same is God. Stay focused on Him. In God We Trust.

How wonderful is the word of God.

These questions are difficult. The answers are not obvious, and so there should be some pausing, some angst, some honest uncertainty as people struggle to decide the best course of action. But I see none of this in the press releases and reports I read. Instead I see both sides telling us that to be uncertain, to dialogue instead of rail, is to betray the cause.

You’ve heard the saying “time heals all wounds.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Time won’t heal all wounds. Jesus will. By His wounds, we are healed. That’s what this book is all about. There is a real answer to the why question, and it’s much better than anything you could ever make up.

The 330 million gods and goddesses of the Hindu culture act as placebo for the masses, just like other gods of other cultures do.

So, were every man on earth to become atheist, it could not affect God in any way. He is what He is in Himself without regard to any other. To believe in Him adds nothing to His perfections; to doubt Him takes nothing away.Almighty God, just because He is almighty, needs no support. The picture of a nervous, ingratiating God fawning over men to win their favor is not a pleasant one; yet if we look at the popular conception of God, that is precisely what we see. Twentieth century Christianity has put God on charity. So lofty is our opinion of ourselves that we find it quite easy, not to say enjoyable, to believe that we are necessary to God. But the truth is that God is not greater for our being, nor would He be less if we did not exist.

Jews are obligated to fulfill the particularities of Mosaic law. They don't light Sabbath candles simply because candles make them feel close to God, but because God commanded the lighting of candles: Closeness might be a nice by-product, but it is not the point. Christians will understand candle-lighting a little differently. Spiritual practices don't justify us. They don't save us. Rather, they refine our Christianity; they make the inheritance Christ gives us on the Cross more fully our own... Practicing the spiritual disciplines does not make us Christians. Instead, the practicing teaches us what it means to live as Christians.

Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not whol

You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.

Whether Jesus calms the storm or calms us in the storm, His love is the same, and His grace is enough.