All Quotes By Tag: Faith

“No human mind can fully grasp the gift of Christ’s atonement, the vastness and inclusiveness of the act—but in the end, it comes down to just you and Jesus. You’ve come, and He’s met you with open arms—and now it’s just between the two of you.”

“God is merciful cant we all be on the right track of faith but just using different roads?”

“There’s faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there’s faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they’re not entirely certain they’re in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God’s mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence.”

“Faith, in its most correct form, never removes responsibility; it removes fear of responsibility. The results are complete opposites with the greater saying, ‘God’s will is my delight.”

“You were born into this life equipped to succeed. You are a part of God’s perfect plan. Yes, you. The plan would not be perfect if you were missing. Think about that. You matter more than you know.”

“God is as real as a station wagon.”

“We are in God’s hands. We can’t come up with a surprise big enough or a sin vile enough to thwart His plan. If we allow Him to refine us we will inevitably end up free from the impurities that separate us from Him.”

“Yes, she believed God loved her. But if this whole fiasco was His idea of love . . .”

“The cautious faith that never saws off a limb on which it is sitting, never learns that unattached limbs may find strange unaccountable ways of not falling.”

“If we require some kind of sign, or “proof,” for our belief in God, then we believe, or place our tust, not in God but in the sign or proof.”

“My friend Adele describes fundamentalism as holding so tightly to your beliefs that your fingernails leave imprints on the palm of your hand… I think she’s right. I was a fundamentalist not because of the beliefs I held but because of how I held them: with a death grip. It would take God himself to finally pry them out of my hands. (p.17-18)”

“There is a greater Christian faith than one which settles for the temporal happiness, and that is the augmentation of faith. The more faithful you become, the harder the obstacles get; but the harder the obstacles get, the tougher your spine grows; and the tougher your spine grows, the less dependent you are on man’s approval. I came to know this about Christianity when valuing faith before comfort.”

“I prayed to what all things hold in common. I prayed to what makes life. I thought about the elements of the universe, the rocks, the stars, the air, other living things. I tried to get the perspective of what’s behind all that. I prayed to the force that brings things into existence. I thought this force encompassed all it created. My God was transcendent, and my God was also immanent. God ran in my veins. God lived and died and lived again in every atom of the universe.”

“I prayed to a mystery.Sometimes I was simply aware of the mystery. I saw a flash of it during a trip to New York that David and I took before we were married. We were walking on a busy sidewalk in Manhattan. I don’t remember if it was day or night. A man with a wound on his forehead came toward us. His damp, ragged hair might have been clotted with blood, or maybe it was only dirt. He wore deeply dirty clothes. His red, swollen hands, cupped in half-fists, swung loosely at his sides. His eyes were focused somewhere past my right shoulder. He staggered while he walked. The sidewalk traffic flowed around him and with him. He was strange and frightening, and at the same time he belonged on the Manhattan sidewalk as much as any of us. It was that paradox — that he could be both alien and resident, both brutalized and human, that he could stand out in the moving mass of people like a sea monster in a school of tuna and at the same time be as much at home as any of us — that stayed with me. I never saw him again, but I remember him often, and when I do, I am aware of the mystery.Years later, I was out on our property on the Olympic Peninsula, cutting a path through the woods. This was before our house was built. After chopping through dense salal and hacking off ironwood bushes for an hour or so, I stopped, exhausted. I found myself standing motionless, intensely aware of all of the life around me, the breathing moss, the chattering birds, the living earth. I was as much a part of the woods as any millipede or cedar tree. At that moment, too, I was aware of the mystery.Sometimes I wanted to speak to this mystery directly. Out of habit, I began with “Dear God” and ended with “Amen”. But I thought to myself, I’m not praying to that old man in the sky. Rather, I’m praying to this thing I can’t define. It was sort of like talking into a foggy valley.Praying into a bank of fog requires alot of effort. I wanted an image to focus on when I prayed. I wanted something to pray *to*. but I couldn’t go back to that old man. He was too closely associated with all I’d left behind.”

“God arranges everything for us, so that we need have no more fear or trouble and may be quite sure that all things will come right in the end.”