Christianity Quotes - Page 9

Joy is distinctly a Christian word and a Christian thing. It is the reverse of happiness. Happiness is the result of what happens of an agreeable sort. Joy has its spring deep down inside. And that spring never runs dry, no matter what happens. Only Jesus gives that joy.

Back then, I think, both sides were just very young. They needed to grow up enough to realize that thing get quite complicated in the business of living, that a lot of things require mutual understanding and compromise. I mean, when you get right down to it, all business for us men on earth is based on material things - so we've just got to work hard and share the fruits of our labors with one another. Only when that is done righteously can we render our faith honorably to God. Within a generation of adopting a school of thought in the name of New Learning, be it Christianity or socialism, we all became such ardent followers that we forgot the way of life we'd led for so long. (2007: 163)

The division in human religion has always been between those who see the fall of man as a fall into freedom and those who see it as an act of defiance against the tyranny of an all-powerful father. But Adam and Eve were never in heaven; they were in the mud, and had to leave the only home they had ever known behind. And why? For choosing love and freedom over perpetual infancy and slavery of the will. Their sin was moral responsibility. Their reward is clear: "They have becomes gods--knowing good and evil." And for that, they were condemned to live in a world of discovery and choices.

The Right thinks that the breakdown of the family is the source of crime and poverty, and this they very insightfully blame on the homosexuals, which would be amusing were it not so tragic. Families and 'family values' are crushed by grinding poverty, which also makes violent crime and drugs attractive alternatives to desperate young men and sends young women into prostitution. Family values are no less corrupted by the corrosive effects of individualism, consumerism, and the accumulation of wealth. Instead of shouting this from the mountain tops, the get-me-to-heaven-and-the-rest-be-damned Christianity the Christian Right preaches is itself a version of selfish spiritual capitalism aimed at netting major and eternal dividends, and it fits hand in glove with American materialism and greed.

The fatal effects of sin can be removed only by the provision that God has made. The Israelites saved their lives by looking upon the uplifted serpent. That look implied faith. They lived because they believed God's word, and trusted in the means provided for their recover. So to sinner may look to Christ, and live. He receives pardon through faith in the atoning sacrifice. Unlike the inert and lifeless symbol, Christ has power and virtue in Himself to heal the repenting sinner.

If I choose to take the pen from God and write the story of my life without Him, I better have plenty of erasers and a whole lot of white-out. Better yet, I should invest in a good shredder.

I love that there's no cutoff where we get labeled and sent off to a home for hopeless, cranky, depressives. Every day is a new chance to listen longer and be braver and love more. We get to try again and again and again.

So long as you are in God's hands, He will not throw you away. God cannot drop you for you to be ashamed.

Of course in the present situation the Communists have to use various disguises. Sometimes we hear words like "popular front," at other times "dialogue with Christianity." For Communists a dialogue with Christianity! In the Soviet Union this dialogue was a simple matter: they used machine guns and revolvers.

A true Christian is made by faith and love toward Christ. Our sins do not in the least hinder our Christianity, according to the word of the Savior Himself. He deigned to say: not the righteous have I come to call, but sinners to salvation; there is more joy in heaven over one who repents than over ninety righteous ones. Likewise concerning the sinful woman who touched His feet, He deigned to say to the Pharisee Simon: to one who has love, a great debt is forgiven, but from one who has no love, even a small debt will be demanded. From these judgments a Christian should bring himself to hope and joy, and not in the least accept an inflicted despair. Here one needs the shield of faith.

Think about it. Before the creation of the world, before anything or anyone existed, there was a living, loving God. There is not chaos at the centre. There is a Father. The emptiness our earthly fathers have left in us should not be a deterrent from God but rather an invitation to have our needs fulfilled by him in the deepest part of our being.

Why would you accept the Jesus of the Bible, if you have rejected the Bible of Jesus?

Protestant Christianity, whether in its liberal or conservative garb, finds itself waking up each morning in bed with a deteriorating modern culture, between sheets with a raunchy sexual reductionism, despairing scientism, morally normless cultural relativism, and self-assertive individualism. We remain resident aliens, OF the world but not profoundly in it, dining at the banquet table of waning modernity without a whisper of table grace. We all wear biblical name tags (Joseph, David, and Sarah), but have forgotten what our Christian names mean.

Not by discussions nor by argument, but by lifting up Christ shall we draw men unto Him.

I do not believe profanity has anything to do with Christianity, thank you.

Listening in the spiritual life is much more than a psychological strategy to help others discover themselves. In the spiritual life the listener is not the ego, which would like to speak but is trained to restrain itself, but the Spirit of God within us. When we are baptised in the Spirit - that is, when we have received the Spirit of Jesus as the breath of God breathing within us - that Spirit creates in us a sacred space where the other can be received and listened to. The Spirit of Jesus prays in us and listens in us to all who come to us with their sufferings and pains. When we dare to fully trust in the power of God's Spirit listening in us, we will see true healing occur.

I am positive that much that passes for the gospel in our day is very little more than a very mild case of orthodox religion grafted on to a heart that is sold out to the world in its pleasures and tastes and ambitions.

Never accuse God. He doesn't buy that.

My recommendation instead, however, is that we do not surrender questions of value, whether absolute matters of truth, goodness, and beauty or relative judgment of more or less truth, goodness, and beauty. With those questions to the fore, in fact, we can interrogate various other traditions and truly learn something that can improve our own. Perhaps the Presbyterians really do know more than we do about due process in church government. Perhaps the Orthodox really do know some things we do not about iconography. Perhaps the Mennonites really can teach us the meaning of 'enough.' Perhaps the Pentecostals can help liberate us from dull and disembodied worship. Baptists who have learned to improve their procedures from Presbyterians, their art from the Orthodox, their finances from the Mennonites, and their worship from the Pentecostals do not therefore become worse Baptists but better ones. And so around the ecumenical circle, no?

Despair sees no hope, while hope sees no despair.

Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.

There are as many kinds of anger as there are of the sunsets with which they ought to end

The eye fixed on Christ sees clearly, succumbing to neither pride nor inferiority, because it is not concerned with the self at all.

I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a shit. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.

Contemporary Christians have declared war on individual immorality but seem remarkably silent about the evil of systems, especially corporate greed and malfeasance. (p. 176)

The Christian church is an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most diverse orgiin and that is why it is so capable of proselytising: it always could and it can still go wherever it pleases and it always found and it always finds something similar to itself to which it can adapt itself and gradually impose upon it a Christian meaning.

Martin Luther called the church building the “Mundhaus” (lit. “mouth house” or "speech house”) because he believed that the Graeco-Roman “pagan lecture” of the sophist entertainers who took over the Catholic church should be the focus of “the service”. Sermons might have been helpful in the later Middle Ages when even many Catholic priests couldn't read. However, modern research has repeatedly proven that lecturing is the worst possible way to educate others because it’s so boring. Might traditional, so-called-inspired preaching still be the best way to communicate God’s Word?” ~ © gfp '42™

Principles are what people have instead of God.To be a Christian means among other things to be willing if necessary to sacrifice even your highest principles for God's or your neighbour's sake the way a Christian pacifist must be willing to pick up a baseball bat if there's no other way to stop a man from savagely beating a child.Jesus didn't forgive his executioners on principle but because in some unimaginable way he was able to love them.'Principle' is an even duller word than 'Religion'.

If God give you a status, don't turn yourself to a statue. Don't become a monument. God still want to reside inside you but not in a monument.

If we look into the matter of how Christian theology rose in the beginning, the Christian Church was always already earlier, and thus even now for each individual the Christian Church is earlier than theology.

Christianity has become so respectable and so conventional that it is now insipid. The salt has lost its flavor.

Jesus, unlike the founder of any other major faith, holds out hope for ordinary human life. Our future is not an ethereal, impersonal form of consciousness. We will not float through the air, but rather will eat, embrace, sing, laugh, and dance in the kingdom of God, in degrees of power, glory, and joy that we can't at the present imagine.

Lord of lords!

There is no more hateful person than a Christian who thinks you’ve got your theology wrong.

Your ability to consummate Leadership or follower-ship brings fulfillment at each appointed time in life

With addiction, a client’s fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana —the fear of Fear itself.

We don't know the Devil's side of the story, because God wrote all the books.

Although some of the people at church rejected and even denounced me, this did not particularly hinder me in my search. Rather, the fact that there were church people as weak and foolish as I was myself gave me a deep sense of reassurance. Arrogantly I thought, 'If God accepts that sort of person, isn't it possible thatHe will even accept me?' And I began to read the Bible more attentively.

There are too many professed Christians who never get “wrought up” about anything; they never get indignant with injustice, with corruption in high places, or with the godless traffics which barter away the souls and bodies of people.

Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll is easy. True christianity…that's rebellion.

Grace grows best in winter.

No soul has the power to save. You can only tell others about the Saviour.

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.

Whoever sees the light shall never walk in darkness.

It is easier for a Russian to become an Atheist, than for any other nationality in the world. And not only does a Russian 'become an Atheist,' but he actually BELIEVES IN Atheism, just as though he had found a new faith, not perceiving that he has pinned his faith to a negation. Such is our anguish of thirst!

After eating the world's bread, we wake each morning to remember: We are still hungry. Seek a better loaf. Eat, and never die. Taste, savor, and be filled forever.

Is it true, what Jesus believed, this Truth that he died for and lived for? Maybe the only way to know finally this side of falling off that precipice ourselves is to stop speaking and thinking and reading about it so much and to start watching and listening.

God's ways are higher than our ways not because he is less compassionate than we are but because he is more compassionate than we can ever imagine.

Whatever confronts your faith can be a test but if it stands to oppose the content of your personality and the validity of your convictions then it's threat.

now why is the devil's money accepted, the world's offer embraced, and God's rejected? Truly, men do not know the worth of what God offers them. The money the devil and the world offer is in their own currency, and is familiar to them. Swine trample on pearls, because they do not know their value. Men prefer the poor things they have because they are in their current possession. The devil seeks to peck out the eyes of men, that they do not see the blessed God and the happiness that is to be enjoyed in him. O how dull is the world's glass in the presence of true crystal! The magnet of earth will not draw man's affections while heaven is visible. He that has fed on the heavenly banquet cannot savor anything else.

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.

The end product of the successful preacher's input is transformation.

The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.

Yeah, it's kind of shitty," I say. I add the shitty on purpose as a kind of a test. I’ve been using it a lot lately to weed the dangerous Christians out of my life: the ones who have the power to hurt me. Throw out a shit or a damn or a what the hell, and see if you get The Look. Watch to see if the person shifts uncomfortably or looks down at her hands … then you know: this is a Dangerous Christian. The kind who will not be able to handle the truth of your pain, the kind that requires some swearing.

We are changed not by being told what we need to do for God, but by hearing the news about what God has done for us.

Too many so-called Christians are like the little chameleon which adapts its coloration to that of its surroundings. Even a critical world is quick to recognize a real Christian and just as quick to detect a counterfeit.

Despite all of our incessant tinkering, we can’t manufacture the things we most desperately need. And if perchance we do, they will never be more than pathetically emaciated facsimiles that will leave us emaciated. And until we finally realize that we can only ‘find’ these things, we will never sense any compulsion to ‘find’ God.

When the Lord makes it clear you're to follow Him in this new direction, focus fully on Him and refuse to be distracted by comparisons with others.

We are forgiven, that we may be like Him who forgives us.

The Bible, Holy writings.