All Quotes By Tag: Christianity

“When we look at stories of renaming in the Bible, we often find that a character is handed a new name they never asked for. While I’m sure Abraham treasured the new name and promise God gave him, and while Peter probably felt honored in the moment Jesus proclaimed him the bedrock of the church, not everybody comes by their new name so easily. Some people have to fight for it.”

“There are two ways to interpret what Paul says in Galatians 3:28 about our being one in Christ: either it means that we’re all whitewashed and homogenized and our differences are erased… or it means that we’re called to find a way to make our different identities fit together, like the bright shards in assorted colors that make up the stained glass windows of a cathedral. Are we called to sameness, or are we called to oneness?”

“It might seem daunting to a congregation to have to learn about pronouns, or to designate a bathroom gender-neutral, or to have difficult conversations about what it means to affirm LGBTQ+ identities. But transgender people are not a burden for Christianity, or for the church. They come bearing gifts!”

“To combat the sin of self-sufficiency, we need a special kind of faith. It’s what I call Starbucks Rest Room Faith. Almost every Starbucks store has a sensor that controls the light in the rest room. You can’t just flip a switch, and you can’t make it go on by just waving your arm inside the door. You have to put your whole body into that dark room and trust that the light will come on as you enter. Faith in God is a lot like that. He doesn’t offer a safety net, He doesn’t let us hedge our bets, and He doesn’t give any guaranteed results ahead of time. We have to be all in before the light comes on.”

“The way to Heaven is ascending; we must be content to travel uphill, though it be hard and tiresome, and contrary to the natural bias of our flesh.”

“Christianity is not something you do, so much as something that is done to you.”

“I know. You are about to say that Satan lifts up the evil lords to thwart God’s power (that’s the standard argument, I believe) but you can’t have it both ways. If there is an all-powerful God who created everything, then He must have created Lucifer to become Satan. If He has a Divine Plan, then Satan is part of that plan—evil, hatred, misery, disease, squalor, death—these must all be part of the plan. Mordred and Malestair and their ilk are part of God’s plan. The other option is that Satan was a mistake. But if God made a mistake—especially one of that magnitude, one Hell of a mistake—how can you believe that He is all-knowing and all-powerful? It calls into question the supposedly ‘inevitable’ outcome of the cosmic battle between good and evil.”

“I think you’re wrong. Most of us don’t choose to believe. We believe because we have to. Heaven represents hope. In this harsh, short, and brutal existence, people have to have something to which to cling. Instead of living lives of abject despair, heads hung in defeat, and watering the soil with our tears, we live lives of hope, heads upraised to the sun, cheerful through impossible hardships—lending our hands to our neighbors. Even if, as you seem to argue, God is simply an idea in the human mind and Heaven is only a fiction, isn’t a life strengthened by faith better than one focused on the inescapable despair of mortality?”

“We live liturgically, telling our sacred Story in worship and song. We fast and we feast. We marry and give our children in marriage, and though in exile, we work for the peace of the city. We welcome our newborns and bury our dead. We read the Bible and we tell our children about the saints. And we also tell them in the orchard and by the fireside about Odysseus, Achilles, and Aeneas, of Dante and Don Quixote, and Frodo and Gandalf and all the tales that bear what it means to be men and women of the West. We work, we pray, we confess our sins, we show mercy, we welcome the stranger, and we keep the commandments. When we suffer, especially for Christ’s sake, we give thanks, because that is what Christians do. Who knows what God, in turn, will do with our faithfulness? It is not for us to say. Our command is, in the words of the Christian poet W.H. Auden, to “stagger onward rejoicing”

“We cannot do, say, think, be anything but what God has already seen, already ordained, already determined. We think in terms of past, and present, and future, and God contains them all in his knowledge, a bucket of truths about us. We think, “God already knows,” and we often translate this as, “God already made it to be the case that…” or “God already did.” At least, we think, It can’t be anything except this.But I think God’s foreknowledge might be better understood as an action. God foreknows because he is in all the places where we will go, because he stands next to us and near us before and after we get there. He hovers over and in and through time, and here the descriptions feel thin, unable to pin down the truth. God stands where we will stand. God moves where we will move. God sees what we do not yet, but will someday see.”

“The sins of my youth hunt me down with ferocity, they are new every morningMy soul is troubled, and I am graced with disgrace This is a losing war, and my determination seems not enough to deliver meI have prayed and I have interceded, I have stayed up all night hoping to reconfigure my brain I pray and I plead and I pray to the heavens, lest the fingers that fed me forget meMy shameful lust has stripped me of all dignity, as I bow down and am made slave to sin Bound by my own iniquity, the wrath of God draws nearerI can only plead for mercy for so long, before I am considered a lost causeA solution for my madness is not evident, and my deliverance is nowhere in sightThis is sinking sand upon which I tread, and the clock is ticking”

“I see now that life is warbut I am so tired -”

“I do pray for those who wish me evil. This is the prayer: As you said in Psalm 79:12 ‘And render unto our neighbors SEVENFOLD into their bosom their reproach, wherewith they have reproached thee, O Lord.’ Let all their evil against me be brought SEVENFOLD back to the sender, according to the Bible. In Jesus Name we pray. Amen.’ – STRONG by Kailin Gow”

“The enemy knows God has a purpose and plan for your life. The enemy is the one who wants you to give up.”

“Mercy, though crucial, brings us through, but grace adds an extra touch of God’s goodness.”