“Jesus lets us be real with our life and our faith.”

“When we worry, our heart doesn’t leave space for God. When we pray and trust God, we leave space for miracles.”“The way to God is through Jesus, in Him we have an advocate for our dreams and prayers.”“In Jesus’s words to love our neighbor, it contains an obligation to go beyond being kind. Giving and sharing is part of this obligation.”

“As a child abuse and neglect therapist I do battle daily with Christians enamored of the Old Testament phrase “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” No matter how far I stretch my imagination, it does not stretch far enough to include the image of a cool dude like Jesus taking a rod to a kid.”

“The healing is my working out my salvation. The need constant because my desire for seperateness constantly wrestles with my need for oneness with Jesus. The search for Jesus is bigger, deeper and agonizing.”

“أجمل ما في الحب بداياته التي تسبق الاعتراف به بشكلٍ صريحٍ.. وأسوأ ما فيه أن تكون له نهاية حتَّى وإن كانت سعيدة.. فالسّعادة يضيعها الملل والاعتياد، وإن حافظ عليها المحبون تبقى كسلعةٍ مُجمدةٍ، فقدت حيويتها وفائدتها، فليت كل العشاق يحبون من البداية إلى البداية!!”

“You deny them hope… You are telling them that Jesus loves them, but not much.”

“Dead men cannot take effective action; their power of influence on others lasts only till the grave. Deeds and actions that energise others belong only to the living. Well, then, look at the facts in this case. The Saviour is working mightily among men, every day He is invisibly persuading numbers of people all over the world, both within and beyond the Greek-speaking world, to accept His faith and be obedient to His teaching. Can anyone, in face of this, still doubt that He has risen and lives, or rather that He is Himself the Life? Does a dead man prick the consciences of men…?”

“What would people think?’Jesus said that people think all sorts of things. The human mind is like a cloud of gnats. Constant motion. That’s why you have to look at the heart.’Oh,’ said Grandpa.”

“Christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another, except that the more bitter our enemy’s hatred, the greater his need of love. Be his enmity political or religious, he has nothing to expect from a follower of Jesus but unqualified love. In such love there is not inner discord between the private person and official capacity. In both we are disciples of Christ, or we are not Christians at all.”

“‎Those who aren’t following Jesus aren’t his followers. It’s that simple. Followers follow, and those who don’t follow aren’t followers. To follow Jesus means to follow Jesus into a society where justice rules, where love shapes everything. To follow Jesus means to take up his dream and work for it.”

“On the concept of unity- “Thatʼs right-Jesusʼ most pressing concern beforeleaving the earth was our unity. He was looking ahead, to every generation ofbeliever. And as he prayed, he made it clear that our witness as his body in thisfractured , messed-up, chaotic world would depend on our love for another.”

“Whoever has My commandments and keeps them loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and show Myself to him.”

“I used to think that kid might become a preacher. Now I don’t see how he’s going to stay out of prison. Nobody in this family ever went to prison for sex crimes. He’d be the first.”Yes,” says Jesus, “you never know about these things.”He and Grandpa are drinking cups of coffee and eating ginger snaps. Grandpa says, “When are you planning to return to earth?”Soon as I finish this coffee,” say Jesus. “Pretty good, isn’t it.”

“Jesus’s use of the phrasing “a new commandment” is frequently scanted in light of its implicit ramifications. Because Jesus at the Last Supper has executed the “new covenant” with his disciples, the Great Commandment itself now acquires an unprecedented meaning. Its new meaning belongs to this sudden revelation not merely about who God is but also about what love is. Previously the Great Commandment bade us to love God and our neighbor. Now this love can be comprehended only in an incarnational situation. Its incarnate presence is the activation of profound rhizomic relations that explode from the center toward the ends of the earth. We are commanded to be incarnational in relation to one another just as God at the cross was incarnational in Christ. . . . We are no longer simply Christ’s “followers” – the pre-Easter form of relation to a master-and-teacher that is conventionally called “disciple” – but also perpetual Christ incarnators . . .”

“If the church is to survive as a place where head and heart are equal partners in faith, then we will need to commit ourselves once again not to the worship of Christ, but to the imitation of Jesus. His invitation was not to believe, but to follow. (p. 145)”