All Quotes By Tag: Faith

“Jesus invited people to ‘repent and believe’ this Good News; to set aside fear and worry in order to believe in God’s love; and to reject self-centeredness in order to give loving service to others. Jesus insisted, says Karl Baus, that purity of mind and intention is the basis for moral behavior, ‘thus giving the individual conscience the decisive role in the sphere of religion.”

“And whenever people claim that one group is in, saved, accepted by God, forgiven, enlightened, redeemed- and everybody else isn’t- why is it that those who make this claim are almost always part of the group that’s “in”?”

“She knew there could be no certainty, only faith. Could she find faith?”

“She did not suppose for a moment that anything worth having, and she now knew faith to be supremely worth having, was ever easy to have.”

“The verge between sea and land marked the manifestation of the symbolic transition between the known and the unknown. Between life and death, spirit and mind, between an unlimited host of elements and forces contrary yet locked together. Lives were given to the seas, treasures were flung into their depths. And, upon the waters themselves, ships and their crews were dragged into the deep time and again.”

“Often times when I meet atheists and we talked about the god they don’t believe in, we quickly discover that I don’t believe in that god either.”

“If you want to be an authentic writer, learn to tell the truth, to wrestle with it, to reflect on it, and then to write about it with great care. And great humility.”

“Like many biblical terms we see in scripture, the word “holy” and the call to be holy have often been co-opted by various tribes and adjusted to suit their particular agendas. In my experience, and perhaps this is true for you, too, the call to be holy has been a call to conform. Preachers…then prescribe for us all of the changes we need to make in our lives so that we’ll conform to the image and likeness of their particular brand of Christianity. “Holy living,” then, becomes a call to conform to the beliefs and practices of a particular group or tribe as evidence that we are truly walking with God.Although we are called to be imitators of Christ, and to conform to his image and likeness, we must remember that his image and likeness do not conform to any of the various paradigms we like to use to box God in. Holy living, then, becomes conformity with Christ, but radical nonconformity with all those Christian tribes or labels that try to neatly create a limited space where God supposedly lives and works.”

“Losing one’s faith is like losing a job one never wanted in the first place.”

“I have no faith in the police, the courts or the corporate government.”

“You can’t do God’s will your way.”

“Just as evil is more than the sum total of individual acts of wrongdoing, so Jesus’ victory over evil is more than the sum total of subsequent individual acts of selfless love. Christian faith, faith in the crucified Jesus, is more than my individual belief that he died for me, vital thought that it is. It is the faith that on the cross Jesus in principle won the victory over sin, violence, pride, arrogance and even death itself, and that that victory can now be implemented. This faith refuses to accept that violence,, greed, and pride are unassailable and unchallengeable. This faith will go to work to challenge and subvert those destructive forces, in ourselves, in our local communities, in our corporate and political life, in the belief, albeit often in the teeth of the evidence, that they have been defeated and that the power of God’s love is stronger than they are.”

“Our task [as Christians] is to be faithful to the calling of the cross; to live in God’s new world as the agents of his love,and to pray that the cross we carry today will become part of the healing and reconciliation of the world. We will not understand in the present time how it is that our pain, our illness, our heartbreak, our deep frustration, is somehow taken up into the pain of God and the healing of the world; but if we offer it back to God that is precisely what will happen.”

“Unless you are willing to do the ridiculous, God will not do the miraculous. When you have God, you don’t have to know everything about it; you just have to do it.”

“…uncrossing is an act of faith, because you trust in the universe, or whatever it is that you trust in, to fill the space you’re creating with whatever it is that you really need.”