All Quotes By Tag: Church

“An expensive car is material in nature, but driving it does not necessarily make us materialist, just as sitting in a church does not make us spiritual.”

“Get up off of your knees. Come out of your churches, your mosques, your temples. God can hear your prayers for peace, justice, and hope in this broken world just fine while you’re out creating peace, working for justice, and giving hope to this broken world. When are we finally going to realize that humanity is the solution to inhumanity? When will we finally understand that we are all drops of the same ocean, hurting together, healing together, hoping together? Don’t just pray for hands to heal the hurting. Pray with hands that are healing the hurting. Don’t just pray for arms to help the helpless. Pray with arms that are helping the helpless. Don’t just pray for feet to respond to need. Pray on feet that are responding to need. Don’t just pray for someone to do something. Be someone who does something. Don’t just pray for answers. Be the answer.”

“Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths.”

“The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”(August 9, 1955)”

“Some believe God is in the sky,Others believe God is in the church But few believe God is in them…I wonder why?”

“A sunset is God’s way of saying He loves you. A good grade on a test is God’s way of saying He loves you. Throughout any given day, God makes it so that you are comforted, secure and loved.”

“The Christian life is a process of better understanding what Jesus taught, learning to apply that teaching in our everyday lives, and then teaching others – people directly around us and people on the other side of the globe – to do the same.”

“I’ve never much liked the whole setup of Christianity, with its emphasis on being saved, thereby acknowledging a debt that can only be paid by a lifetime of sacrifice and devotion. Must God’s love have strings attached? People who crave salvation should think about how they’re going to feel if it turns out that this God who saved them is, upon closer acquaintance, completely alien. He, possibly she (or, more likely, it), is not now and never has been one of us. Jesus clearly was not one of us, with his crypto-stories about the prodigal who is more beloved by the father than the dutiful son and the sliding pay scale for field hands, with his magic powers that run the gamut from improving the wedding beverage to blasting trees to raising the dead. These days we have born-agains everywhere, even in the White House, carping about how clear and meaningful everything is now that they’ve seen the light and accepted Christ as their Savior. There they were, just sinning along aimlessly, drinking and fornicating down that slippery slope lined with good intentions and ending you know where, when suddenly Jesus reached out and down or across and saved them. And now they feel grateful all the time, every day. It things go wrong, that’s God’s way of testing their faith, and if they are successful and make lots of money, that proves they have been chosen by God.It’s supposed to be all about free will, but there’s not much freedom in it. And if God is really so eager to save the desperate from themselves, where was he when my mother was knocking back the Seconal with her lunatic girlfriend from hell.”

“Religion is great at instilling the fear of hell, but awful at giving a taste of heaven.”

“I stepped inside a church once, when it was raining really hard and I couldn’t get my umbrella open. It smelled like old people, and every little noise I made echoed really loudly. I remember everyone in the pews turning to stare at me funny, but that could have been because I interrupted their service. You know, by jumping up and down and screaming that God was burning me.”

“I believe in God because I believe in what I feel. And when I’m in church or praying, I feel loved. I feel safe. I feel like someone knows me.”

“I believe in love. I believe in the love Lucy shows me, the kind I’ll try hard to give back to her in full. I believe in things I can’t put into words, but things I know to be true. I believe in us. I believe in this. Amen.”

“Don’t try to tame the wild God”

“The church must suffer for speaking the truth, for pointing out sin, for uprooting sin. No one wants to have a sore spot touched, and therefore a society with so many sores twitches when someone has the courage to touch it and say: “You have to treat that. You have to get rid of that. Believe in Christ. Be converted.”

“The organist was almost at the end of the anthem’s long introduction, and as the crescendo increases the cathedral began to glitter before my eyes until I felt as if every stone in the building was vibrating in anticipation of the sweeping sword of sound from the Choir.The note exploded in our midst, and at that moment I knew our creator had touched not only me but all of us, just as Harriet had touched that sculpture with a loving hand long ago, and in that touch I sensed the indestructible fidelity, the indescribable devotion and the inexhaustible energy of the creator as he shaped his creation, bringing life out of dead matter, wresting form continually from chaos. Nothing was ever lost, Harriet had said, and nothing was ever wasted because always, when the work was finally completed, every article of the created process, seen or unseen, kept or discarded, broken or mended – EVERYTHING was justified, glorified and redeemed.”