Christianity Quotes - Page 41

Once you emerge from the state of absolute divinity, the self within you becomes Christ – it becomes Buddha – it becomes Moses – it becomes Krishna. The sage who emerges from the state of non-duality begins to perceive the self as Christ, not Christ as Christ – the self as Moses, not Moses as Moses – the self as Mohammed, not Mohammed as Mohammed – the self as Krishna, not Krishna as Krishna.

There are three laws that govern our universe - laws of physics, laws of nature, and spiritual laws. Like the laws of physics and nature, spiritual laws are just as precise as any mathematics equation.

The judicial methods used by the Communists in our day are the same as those of the Holy Inquisition. To secure the Reign of Terror, the Communists are as brutal as the Christian Church was during a long period of thirteen hundred years, for the same end. Christianity and Communism, - the Judaic Twins - in merciless brutality do not differ from each other. - The history book of the Holy Inquisition became the textbook of the Communist secret police.

To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.

Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed.

We need encouragement, not sermonizing, and we need clear-eyed acknowledgement of the situation, not a sanctified gloss that pushes us toward saying, 'I see I must not admit my pain because, after all, I'm a Christian. I'll just have to cover it up.

It is also possible to say precisely why. Truth seduces us very easily into a kind of joy of possession: I have comprehended this and that, learned it, understood it. Knowledge is power. I am therefore more than the other man who does not know this and that. I have greater possibilities and also greater temptations. Anyone who deals with truth - as we theologians certainly do - succumbs all too easily to the psychology of the possessor. But love is the opposite of the will to possess. It is self-giving. It boasteth not itself, but humbleth itself.

Christianity today is so subnormal that if any Christian began to act like a normal New Testament Christian, he would be considered abnormal

Father, I do acknowledge and confessThat I this honor, I this pomp have broughtTo Dagon, and advanc’d his praises highamong the Heathen round; to God have broughtDishonor, obloquy, and op’d the mouthsOf Idolists, and Atheists[…]The anguish of my Soul, that suffers notMine eye to harbor sleep, or thoughts to rest.This only hope relieves me, that the strifeWith mee hath end.

I turned and beheld seven rows of plasma screens, each bearing seven vivid scenes, each flickering, each pulsing with a light revealing distant terrors, conflagrations, sufferings - and all thereby brought so close, and all thereby kept far away.

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.

With a humble heart, great grace abound.

If the saints fails to declare the truth, the Holy Spirit shall teach true words of God.

As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluenced by the real content of our history which we know only in a deep and guarded privacy, we are still in the throes of the paradox of the “gentleman and soldier.” However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism—an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves.

Christians believe in a big God but do small things and this is a big insult to God.

Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.

When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regardded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapsesl when we see the steady methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man's worthlesseness - until redeemed - the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church state.

The greatest futility! says the congregator, "The greatest futility! Everything is futile!" What does a person gain from all his hard work- At which he toils under the sun? A generation goes and another cometh forth, but the earth remains the same.

But what Tyler longed for was to have The Feeling arrive; when every flicker of light that touched the dipping branches of a weeping willow, every breath of breeze that bent the grass towards the row of apple trees, every shower of yellow ginko leaves dropping to the ground with such direct and tender sweetness, would fill the minister with profound and irreducible knowledge that God was right there.

Man is free only within communion. If the Church wishes to be the place of freedom, she must continually place all the 'objects' she possesses, whatever they may be (Scripture, sacraments, ministries, etc.) within the communion-event to make them 'true' and to make her members free in regard to them as objects, as well as in them and through them as channels of communion. Christians must learn not to lean on objective 'truths' as securities for truth, but to live in an epicletic way, i.e. leaning on the communion-event in which the structure of the Church involves them. Truth liberates by placing beings in communion.

A healthy Christian life cannot be stitched together from a series of disjointed mountain-top experiences. We need a Christian spirituality that endures the shadowy, low-lying valleys and the rocky slopes in between all those glorious summits.

We should consider that the brightness of the Divine countenance, which even an apostle declares to be inaccessible, (1Ti 6: 16) is a kind of labyrinth — a labyrinth to us inextricable, if the Word do not serve us as a thread to guide our path; and that it is better to limp in the way, than run with the greatest swiftness out of it.

Of all the great world religions, Christianity should value the body most. After all, it taught that God had in some sense taken a human body and used it to redeem the world; everything about the physical should have been sacred and sacramental. But that had not happened. instead, the churches had found it almost impossible to integrate the sexual with the divine and had developed a Platonic aversion to the body - particularly the bodies of women.

The Bible speaks of the Word of God as added. Sometimes it's planted by the wayside, and nothing grows there. Sometimes it's sown among the thorns and represents the person who makes the decision an then goes back to his old life of bars and chasing women or whatever. A third seed is sown among the rocks. There's sand and dirt between the rocks, and when it rains you'll see a stalk of green coming up. But on the first day with sunshine it wilts because there is no room for roots.The fourth seed is planted on fertile soil, and finally it takes hold and has a chance to grow and live. That's what happened to me.

Freedom comes from focus, focus brings freedom. Focus on fear you will always be in prison, focus on faith and is nothing the world can keep you knocked down.

Over the past two hundred years philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity's cardinal error -the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals.

I have one desire now - to live a life of reckless abandon for the Lord, putting all my energy and strength into it.

When God intends a mercy for his people, he stirs up the spirit of prayer in them. Fervency unites the soul and directs the thoughts to the work at hand. It will not allow diversions and denies all foreign thoughts seeking to intrude. Pray fervently or you do nothing. Cold praying is no more prayer than a painting of fire is fire. How can prayers that do not even warm your own heart move God’s? A fervent prayer will never find a cold reception with God. Elijah’s prayer called fire down from heaven because it carried fire up to heaven.

There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself. As if the Good Lord had nothing better to do than exist!

Every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.

Offence is an event, offended is a decision. Offence and offended we have to live through it but to stay offended? To live in that place denies the very nature of the salvation that you claimed to have received.

Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot.

The miraculous wonder of this blessed day is beyond my comprehension.

Without the fear of God, men do not even observe justice and charity among themselves.

Beware the God who seeks praise. Beware the guru who presumes to teach that which is unfixed and boundless. Beware the healer who sets a price on aid. Beware the lover who would make you a lesser version of yourself. Beware the doctrines that discourage independent thought. Beware any person of faith who doesn’t understand doubt. Filter all things through yourself. Accept only that which sits right with your soul.

If you go through life making every decision based on what issafest, you will look back one day and discover that you have missed out on the best. Allowing fear to run your life will only rob you of your future.

Why is it so hard to get people to study the Scriptures? Common sense tells us what revelation commands: 'Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God'--'Search the Scriptures'--'Be ready to give to every one a reason of the hope that is in you.' These are the words of the inspired writers, and these injunctions are confirmed by praising those who obey the admonition. And yet, for all that we have the Bible in our houses, we are ignorant of its contents. No wonder that so many Christians know so little about what Christ actually taught; no wonder that they are so mistaken about the faith that they profess.

What a joyful journey, to travel with the Lord.

God presents the Sabbath rest as a shelter we can enter. (Hebrews 4:1-11)

You may say we made a mistake placing the birth of Jesus on December 25th. Consider this: in 3 B.C., December 25th was the eighth day of Hanukkah, the day when the greatest gift is given.... Early Christians would not have made up the date, or used a pagan festival date...the date was chosen by people who remembered.

If you want to accurately judge the spiritual level of any human being, count the number of religions that he is capable of understanding and observe how effective he is in applying the lessons learned to his own life or the life of others.

Christmas is the spirit of love, joy and peace.

You can read the word of God, but without mediation and prayer, we become spiritually weak and unfilled.

All individuals have moral deficiencies, and when introducing these to reality one not only strengthens himself but also the confidence of others in the human exigency for Christ due to a reflection throughout the body of Christ.

At the heart of racism stands Satan, not man. No one is more pleased by the racial tension in the world than God's ultimate enemy. I'm sure he marvels at how shallow we humans tend to be, by hating one another simply because of skin color! If you are a child of the Most High God and you are fighting in this war of division and hatred (even if only in thought), you are fighting for the enemy.If this is you, you need to repent of this sin and start seeing others the way God sees them, as made in His image. If not, Satan will keep stirring your mind with thoughts that will not only further stoke the burning hatred of racism deep within you, it will put even more distance between you and the One who saw your unformed body before the foundations of the world, and knit you together in your mother's womb.

God sends the best to those who deserves it.

Somebody who is Christ's must love Christ, and when he loves Christ he is delivered from the Devil, from hell and from death.

For years, the church has emphasized evangelism, teaching, fellowship, missions, and service to society to the neglect of the very source of its power--worship.

If you believe the Bible is true, you ought to know that demons are real. The Bible is filled with references of evil and demons, and Christ repeatedly cast out demons, so I believe the universe is much more complex and mysterious than it may appear to our senses.

You don’t change the world by telling it what to do, sitting at home, and telling it what you believe. You believe by throwing yourself into it. Making a leap, getting involved, then waiting, taking some one person’s place for a while, one suffering person at a time.

But in reading all of the passages in which Jesus uses the word "hell," what is so striking is that people believing the right or wrong things isn't his point. He's often not talking about "beliefs" as we think of them--he's talking about anger and lust and indifference. He's talking about the state of his listeners' hearts, about how they conduct themselves, how they interact with their neighbors, about the kind of effect they have on the world.

Though lip service is paid to the gospel of grace, many Christians live as if only personal discipline and self-denial will mold the perfect me. The emphasis is on what I do rather than on what God is doing. In this curious process God is a benign old spectator in the bleachers who cheers when I show up for morning quiet time.

The more things we accumulate, the more cluttered our lives become, and the more stressed we feel as we are compelled to think about them. Life is about people not about things.

If he had given away anything else, he would have been charged with indecent exposure.

Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.

Never stop studying the Holy Scriptures .

The evidence which we have of the great facts of the Bible history belongs to this class, that is, it is moral evidence; sufficient to satisfy any rational mind, by carrying it to the highest degree of moral certainty. If such evidence well justify the taking away of human life or liberty, in the one case, surely it ought to be deemed sufficient to determine our faith in the other.

You cannot love the Father and dislike His beloved son

In dealing with us, God always starts with our motives. What do you want for the people? What does God wants for his people? What do you want Him to do for you; that's is a starting place.

While I wholeheartedly believe in choosing to approach every challenge with a great attitude, I don't mean that we should abandon authenticity and live in fantasyland.