Quotes by Theologians - Page 4

The mind will always take on an order conforming to that upon which it concentrates.

Richard J. Foster

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.

Søren Kierkegaard

God is willing and able to turn his judgements into joys . . . Don't ever think that the sin of your past means there is no hope for your future.

John Piper

See to it night and day that you pray for your children. Then you will leave them a great legacy of answers to prayer which will follow them all the days of their life. Then you may calmly and with a good conscience depart from them even though you may not leave them a great deal of material wealth.

O. Hallesby

Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.

Meister Eckhart

As he rose to his feet he noticed that he was neither dripping nor panting for breath as anyone would expect after being under water. His clothes were perfectly dry. He was standing by the edge of a small pool—not more than ten feet from side to side in a wood. The trees grew close together and were so leafy that he could get no glimpse of the sky. All the light was green light that came through the leaves: but there must have been a very strong sun overhead, for this green daylight was bright and warm. It was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine. There were no birds, no insects, no animals, and no wind. You could almost feel the trees growing. The pool he had just got out of was not the only pool. There were dozens of others—a pool every few yards as far as his eyes could reach. You could almost feel the trees drinking the water up with their roots. This wood was very much alive.

C.S. Lewis

The private and personal blessings we enjoy-the blessings of immunity safeguard liberty and integrity- deserve the thanksgiving of a whole life.

Jeremy Taylor

we have quoted freely from the Scriptures and have sought to furnish proof-texts for every statement we have advanced.

Arthur W. Pink

Only union with you gives joy. The rest if tearing down one building to put up another.

Jalaluddin Rumi

I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.

G.K. Chesterton

So often when people hear about the suffering in our world, they feel guilty, but rarely does guilt actually motivate action like empathy or compassion. Guilt paralyzes and causes us to deny and avoid what makes us feel guilty. The goal is to replace our guilt with generosity. We all have a natural desire to help and to care, and we simply need to allow ourselves to give from our love without self-reproach. We each must do what we can. This is all that God asks of us." - , God Has a Dream, p. 87-88

Desmond Tutu

Christmas cut history in two ages, the Age of Promise, and the Age of Fulfillment.

John Piper

The Bible is the means through which we are introduced to Jesus and invited to follow Him in the life of humility and service.

Richard Foster

Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.

Frederick Buechner

Prayer is essentially the practice of the presence of God, and that is the road to Heaven. There is no alternative. God is the only game in town. All other roads are dead ends. Since we must give our all to the one true God, we must not give any part to idols, to the many false gods that now bite away at our lives.

Peter Kreeft

Evangelicals now stand among those who are on easiest terms with the world, for they have lost their capacity for dissent.

David F. Wells

The real difference in the believer who follows Christ and has mortified his will and died after the old man in Christ, is that he is more clearly aware than other men of the rebelliousness and perennial pride of the flesh, he is conscious of his sloth and self-indulgence and knows that his arrogance must be eradicated. Hence there is a need for daily self-discipline.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.

G.K. Chesterton

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.

G.K. Chesterton

We are a generation of lovers who long to be loved. We spend exorbitant amounts of money to compel others to delight in us. We construct our ideal life on Facebook because we are unsatisfied with our real life, which is tainted with boredom, loneliness, insecurity, and a lack of friends and followers . We do not enjoy the person God created us to be or the life God has gifted us with. We think we are overweight, underweight, too pale, too dark, too plain, or just plain boring. Yet we crave to be delighted in by a significant other. So we pursue misguided avenues to make ourselves delightful, to satisfy our craving to be loved.Charis: God's Scandalous Grace for Us (pp. 118-119).

Preston Sprinkle

If my sinfulness appears to me to be in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison with the sins of others, I am still not recognizing my sinfulness at all. ... How can I possibly serve another person in unfeigned humility if I seriously regard his sinfulness as worse than my own?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.

C.S. Lewis

When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

You can grieve for me the week before I die, if I’m scared and hurting, but when I gasp that last fleeting breath and my immortal soul flees to heaven, I’m going to be jumping over fire hydrants down the golden streets, and my biggest concern, if I have any, will be my wife back here grieving. When I die, I will be identified with Christ’s exaltation. But right now, I’m identified with His affliction.

R.C. Sproul

By the grace of God we will never pluck unripe fruit. We will never press people to decision, because we'll lead them to damnation and not salvation.

Jonathan Edwards

Those who understand God's sovereignty have joy even in the midst of suffering, a joy reflected on their very faces, for they see that their suffering is not without purpose.

R.C. Sproul

We never feel Christ to be a reality, until we feel Him to be a necessity.

Austin Phelps

What this letter does is bring us into an atmosphere in which the institution could only wilt and die. The Letter to Philemon

F.F. Bruce

People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state--it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle.... Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.Source: The Wisdom of Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The wealthy, Jesus says, can only get into heaven through the eye of a needle; the same applies to churches wealthy in numbers and programs.

Mark Galli

A true Christian lives and labors on earth not for himself but for his neighbor. Therefore the whole spirit of his life him impels him to do even that which he needs not do, but which is profitable and necessary for his neighbor.

Martin Luther

One of my biggest problems in dealing with the breakdown of my body is that I keep looking in the wrong direction. I look to the past and the capabilities I once had, instead of looking to the future and what I will someday become in the presence and by the grace of God. Perhaps that is the strongest temptation for you too. Our culture reinforces that mistake by its refusal to talk about heaven, as if it were an old-fashioned and outdated notion. We also intensify the problem by craving present health (as limited as it can be) more than we desire God.A friend once said to me. "This is so hard getting old—there are so many things we can‘t do any more. I guess the Lord wants to teach us something." Indeed, our bodies will never be what they previously were, and we find that difficult because we miss our former activities. But God wants to teach us to hunger for Him, our greatest treasure. Instead of rejecting the notion of heaven, we genuinely ache in our deepest self to fill that concept with a larger landscape of the Joy of basking in God‘s presence.

Marva J. Dawn

But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be to make use of the word ‘artificial.’ Nothing in the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because the exhibit vanity and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a voice out of the abyss.

G.K. Chesterton

I do not want to drive across a bridge designed by an engineer who believed the numbers in structural stress models are relative truths.

R.C. Sproul

The reader of these reflections of mine on the Trinity should bear in mind that my pen is on the watch against the sophistries of those who scorn the starting-point of faith, and allow themselves to be deceived through an unseasonable and misguided love of reason.

Augustine of Hippo

However grand our sacramental downsittings and updressings may be, they remain only and precisely sacraments: real presences, under particular signs, of the happier order that faith can discover under any and all signs. They're a bit like the church. As long as we see them as an earnest of the kingdom, they're all right; when we put on airs and act as if they were the kingdom itself, they look just silly.

Robert Farrar Capon

As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.

G.K. Chesterton

The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.

C.S. Lewis

I'm not afraid of too many things and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.

Reinhold Niebuhr

The Fall is where the nation is. The Fall is the locus of America.

William Stringfellow

As is typical of this God [of Israel], he calls his people into freedom in the most unlikely place.

Mark Galli

A woman’s mission centered on home and family — vital spheres of ministry to be sure, but only a slice of the vast mission God originally cast by calling women to rule and subdue the earth.

Carolyn Custis James

True friends ... face in the same direction toward common projects interests goals.

C.S. Lewis

The saints, too, had wandering minds. The saints, too, had constantly to recall their constantly wandering mind-child home. They became saints because they continued to go after the little wanderer, like the Good Shepherd.

Peter Kreeft

Shall I tell you our secret? We are charming thieves who steal hearts and never fail because we are the friends of the One.Blessed is the poem that comes through me but not of me because the sound of my own music will drown the song of Love.

Jalaluddin Rumi

It is a greater work to educate a child in the true and larger sense of the word than to rule a state.

William Ellery Channing

[The laws of logic] were placed in our minds by the Creator during the act of creation. We speak because God has spoken. God is not the author of confusion, irrationality, or the absurd. Furthermore, his words are meant to be understood by his creatures, and a necessary condition for his creature's understanding of those words is that they are intelligible and not irrational.

R.C. Sproul

Say I Am YouI am dust particles in sunlight.I am the round sun.To the bits of dust I say, Stay.To the sun, Keep moving.I am morning mist, and the breathing of evening.I am wind in the top of a grove, and surf on the cliff.Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,I am also the coral reef they founder on.I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.Silence, thought, and voice.The musical air coming through a flute,a spark of a stone, a flickering in metal.Both candle and the moth crazy around it.Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,and the falling away. What is, and what isn't.You who know Jelaluddin, You the one in all,say who I am. Say I am You.

Jalaluddin Rumi

...for poets, at least, experiencing something inexpressible does not mean silence. It's precisely the inexpressible something that poetry is meant to help us see or feel. If it were merely expressible - if there were nothing ineffable about it - there would be no need for a poem. But everywhere in the Bible we meet reality that exceeds our expectations.

John Piper

God is calling us to live for the sake of Christ and to do that through suffering. Christ chose suffering; it didn’t just happen to Him. He chose it as the way to create and perfect the church. Now He calls us to choose suffering. That is, He calls us to take up our cross and follow Him on the Calvary road and deny ourselves and make sacrifices for the sake of ministering to the church and presenting His sufferings to the world.

John Piper

Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God' (Hebrews 12:1-2). Jesus was motivated to endure by anticipating the joy of His reward. No amount of hardship and struggle could deprive Him of that anticipation.

Jerry Bridges

There is more mercy in Christ than sin in us.

Richard Sibbes

I am not good at deception,' said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.Right, my boy, right,' said the President with a ponderous heartiness, 'You aren't good at anything.

G.K. Chesterton

Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance.

William Paley (paraphrase)

Man is able to decide for or against reason, he is able to create beyond reason or to destroy below reason

Paul Tillich

It matters very little whether a man is discontented in the name of pessimism or progress if his discontent does in fact paralyse his power of appreciating what he has got.

G.K. Chesterton

Every specific human being, however, thinks, judges, imagines, wills and expresses himself or herself in a unique, dissimilar, and unrepeatable mode--a mode of unpredictable difference, or otherness, which objectively defies description or delimitation.

Christos Yannaras

In Jesus the full meaning of peace is revealed: he gave peace, made peace and is our peace (Jn. 14:27; Eph. 2:14f.).

Gordon J. Wenham

As a newborn baby breathes and cries, so the signs of life in a newborn Christian are faith and repentance, inhaling the love of God and exhaling an initial cry of distress. And at that point what God provides, exactly as for a newborn infant, is the comfort, protection, and nurturing promise of a mother."If God is our father, the church is our mother." The words are those of the Swiss Reformer John Calvin ... it is as impossible, unnecessary, and undesirable to be a Christian all by yourself as it is to be a newborn baby all by yourself.

N.T. Wright

I am yours.Don't give myself back to me.

Jalaluddin Rumi

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