All Quotes By Tag: Jesus

“If I’m not willing to accept a God who does the impossible, I’m left with what’s possible. And that takes me no further than myself.”

“It is my passion to rise to great heights, but instead I dig holes where I plummet to great depths. And when will I learn that God trades shovels for wings?”

“My fear has brazenly taken pen in hand and redefined a horizon as the termination of everything instead of the beginning of many things. And the first thing I need to do is get my pen back.”

“Faith is not whittling God down to a size that I can comprehend. Rather, it’s whittling my need to control down to a size that God can intersect.”

“Easter recognizes that I am living in a prison of my own making, and that God is in the demolition business.”

“I have plenty of faith, but more often than not it’s faith in the belief that faith doesn’t work.”

“I project my limits on God when faith would say that I should be projecting His limitlessness on me.”

“Brilliance without prayer is like a car with four flat tires. It might be a truly fine vehicle, but it isn’t going anywhere.”

“In truth, Thomas was being a faithful disciple of Jesus, who warned His disciples that “many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Messiah!’ and they will lead many astray” (Matt. 24:5). Indeed, Jesus affirms those who believe without seeing because such belief takes great faith. But that in no way suggests we should ignore evidence when it is available, as though doing so makes us more faithful. This impulse, combined with an often uncritical biblicism, not only neglects God’s command to love him with our minds, but leads us into unnecessary divisiveness and shallow literalism that blinds us to the deeper truth of Scripture. Therefore, during this process of self-emptying, we must be aware of and honest with our uncertainties. While we should never throw around our doubt with rebellious defiance, neither should we view our genuine questions and uncertainties as liabilities. Sometimes allowing ourselves to question deeply held beliefs opens us up to discovering that we were, in fact, in error, offering us the opportunity for more faithful understanding. Other times we discover that our fears are unfounded, returning to our former beliefs without doubt, yet stronger for it.”

“Great faith begins with a keen understanding of the greatness of Jesus.”

“The pit is of my own making.  The rescue is of God’s love.  And the deliverance is my acceptance of both.”

“It’s a matter of time. That’s all it is. For God will allow mankind to fall to its own demise so that God can raise us up to His glory. For the farther the fall, the more miraculous the ascent.”

“A dead Christ I must do everything for; a living Christ does everything for me.”

“The cross is not a sign of the church’s quiet, suffering submission to the powers-that-be, but rather the church’s revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers. The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesar’s. The cross stands as God’s (and our) eternal no to the powers of death, as well as God’s eternal yes to humanity, God’s remarkable determination not to leave us to our own devices.”

“He, the Life of all, our Lord and Saviour, did not arrange the manner of his own death lest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind. No. He accepted and bore upon the cross a death inflicted by others, and those other His special enemies, a death which to them was supremely terrible and by no means to be faced; and He did this in order that, by destroying even this death, He might Himself be believed to be the Life, and the power of death be recognised as finally annulled. A marvellous and mighty paradox has thus occurred, for the death which they thought to inflict on Him as dishonour and disgrace has become the glorious monument to death’s defeat.”