You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely! In broad daylight! Openly wearing the symbols of their religion... perhaps around their necks? And maybe - dare I dream it? - maybe one day there can be an openly Christian President. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively.
If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be - a Christian.
Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.
What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.
We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.
The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.
In darkness God's truth shines most clear.
...the wise words of a friend and guide rang in my head. 'How would you distinguish a true servant of God from a traitor?...You should take especial notice of how a person speaks, not of other things, but of God.
Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;
If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!
We never know how God will answer our prayers, but we can expect that He will get us involved in His plan for the answer. If we are true intercessors, we must be ready to take part in God’s work on behalf of the people for whom we pray.
I would stand there at times and remember how beautiful God created this world, and then I would be reassured that he would certainly take care of me and all of my loved ones.
The Bible is the greatest book ever written.
What is it about our expectations, plans, or ideas that hold such sway over us? It is as if we've written a script for a play of our lives that runs about a month ahead of actual life; if reality varies from what we've created in our minds we disengage or pout.
I don't care what the world says. My Bible says you can't live a continuous lifestyle of sin and be a Christian.
The Word of God is your best defence against the troubles of this world.
The Christian life means putting off the character of the world and putting on the character of Christ.
How can we know something that surpasses or is beyond knowledge? How can we know something that is beyond words?... We can and do use words to point to all of our human experiences. However, the experience of "God as Agape" is beyond words, beyond the limitations of our minds.
God has a habit of using people, their gifts, and their resources to carry out His plans. In fact, we were created to be God’s deputies, doing His work on earth.
Whatever characterization one may choose to place on Satan, "imbecile message maker" doesn't fit. This was no third-ranking demon out there in the wilderness throwing lines at Christ. This was the manic master who understood the power of words. He spun what he hoped would be a strike. He failed; Christ succeeded. They both used words.
We Christians must build all of our thinking in every area on the Bible. We must start with God's Word, not the word of finite, fallible man. We must judge what people say on the basis of what God's Word says - not the other way around.
I recommend you don't attend the wheat and chaff bonfire.
A godly woman is beyond average because she keeps her word. She honors her vows. She exhibits great faith. She overcomes great obstacles. And she affects her family, her community, even the world.
The spoken word has come to dominate many Protestant forms of worship: the words of prayers, responsive readings, Scripture, the sermon, and so forth. Yet the spoken word is perhaps the least effective way of reaching the heart; one must constantly pay attention with one’s mind. The spoken word tends to go to our heads, not our hearts.
I "love" reading.
It makes me feel like I am swallowing up Christ, Homer, Confucius, Newton, Franklin, Socrates, Caesar, and the whole world into one gigantic invincible Sir Moffat. Mine is creative reading. I read building empires in mind.
I pray I won't read and read and forget to marry.
A friend is someone who can brighten your day with a simple smile, when others try to do it with a thousand words.
If people feel lost and alone and helpless and broken and hopeless today, what will it be like if the world really begins to come apart at the hinges?
You ever noticed how people who believe in Creationism look really un-evolved? You ever noticed that? Eyes real close together, eyebrow ridges, big furry hands and feet. "I believe God created me in one day". Yeah, looks like He rushed it
We'll see Heaven together. I promise with all my heart I'll never leave you alone.
Bentley mounted Silverwood, look down at his parents, and launched the powerful steed into the kingdom…a kingdom waiting for one young knight to discover the truth of a Stranger.
The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.
Where people know their work and do it, life has few blank spaces for boredom and they are seldom to be pitied. Where people have not yet found their work, they may be more pitied than those that beg their bread. When a man knows his work and will not do it, pity him more than one who is to be hanged tomorrow.
Laughter and irony are at heart reminders that we are not prisoners in this world, but voyagers through it.
Do you know what hurts so very much? It's love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill that love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.
The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.
Love is larger than the walls which shut it in.
I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a man nailed to two pieces of wood.
We profess to be strangers and pilgrims, seeking after a country of our own, yet we settle down in the most un-stranger-like fashion, exactly as if we were quite at home and meant to stay as long as we could. I don't wonder apostolic miracles have died. Apostolic living certainly has.
The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin'.
We are saved by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone.
I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!
I am fallen, flawed and imperfect. Yet drenched in the grace and mercy that is found in Jesus Christ, there is strength
The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self-all your wishes and precautions-to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call "ourselves," to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be "good.
I held my heart back from positively accepting anything, since I was afraid of another fall, and in this condition of suspense I was being all the more killed.
Communicating with God is the most extraordinary experience imaginable, yet at the same time it's the most natural one of all, because God is present in us at all times. Omniscient, omnipotent, personal-and loving us without conditions. We are connected as One through our divine link with God.
When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.
The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so.
He can heal me. I believe He will. I believe I'm going to be an old surely Baptist preacher. And even if He doesn't...that's the thing: I've read Philippians 1. I know what Paul says. I'm here let's work, if I go home? That's better. I understand that.
You can believe in whatsoever you like, but the truth remains the truth, no matter how sweet the lie may taste.
Original sin is not only the violation of a positive command … but … attempts … to abolish fatherhood, destroying its rays which permeate the created world, placing in doubt the truth about God who is Love and leaving man with only a sense of the master-slave relationship.
The truth is, the Devil's job is easy.
God is willing to walk the earth again incarnate in us.
Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love.
God gives us not only the truth but also the ability to believe it; not only the new thing to see but also the new eye to see it with.
Since God is truth, a contempt for truth is equally a contempt for God.
It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished.
The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.
Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything.
If you don't behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
This is the secret of life: the self lives only by dying, finds its identity (and its happiness) only by self-forgetfulness, self-giving, self-sacrifice, and agape love.
Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.
The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man's head because she turns his heart.
If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction.
Never forget that there are only two philosophies to rule your life: the one of the cross, which starts with the fast and ends with the feast. The other of Satan, which starts with the feast and ends with the headache.
Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.
The egocentric is always frustrated, simply because the condition of self-perfection is self-surrender. There must be a willingness to die to the lower part of self, before there can be a birth to the nobler.
The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life―until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty.
The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift from God, the Source of law.
By the way, if you get mad at your Mac laptop and wonder who designed this demonic device, notice the manufacturer's icon on top: an apple with a bite out of it.
Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.
Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!
Those who meet Jesus always experience either joy or its opposites, either foretastes of Heaven or foretastes of Hell. Not everyone who meets Jesus is pleased, and not everyone is happy, but everyone is shocked.
It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable.
God's pleasure-the beauty creation possesses in his regard-underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.
The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.
Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.
Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.
The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society.
Faith is not belief in spite of evidence but a life in scorn of the consequences.
Love gives you eyes.
It is just as crazy not to be crazy about Christ as it is to be crazy about anything else.
It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively.
Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.
Fear is the polio of the soul which prevents our walking by faith.
God is not a celestial prison warden jangling the keys on a bunch of lifers-he's a shepherd seeking for sheep, a woman searching for coins, a father waiting for his son.
Stand in the divine rain, and seeds of wisdom will grow in your soul.
You and I are part of the colony of heaven. Right now, we may reside here on earth, but our passport indicates that our citizenship is in heaven. We are on the earth, but not of the earth.
The connection between art and Christ is like the connection between sunlight and the sun. It is, in fact, the connection between Sonlight and the Son.
The best proof that He will never cease to love us lies in that He never began.
When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the slightest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.
The Christian religion asks us to put our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God Who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and Who desires to be present to us in our ordinary circumstances.
We judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. We need to offer grace to all, because we all need a little grace.
People often speak of hell, not wanting to go there, avoiding it..etc. I never had that problem because hell is a state of mind. Look around you; rape, murder, wars, hatred, envy...my friend; you're already there!!
The gift of the Sabbath must be treasured.
Blessed are you who honour this day.
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.
Joy is distinctly a Christian word and a Christian thing. It is the reverse of happiness. Happiness is the result of what happens of an agreeable sort. Joy has its spring deep down inside. And that spring never runs dry, no matter what happens. Only Jesus gives that joy.
When we persue happiness for it's own sake, it's like chasing the end of a rainbow. It will always elude us. It is when we're committed to some higher purpose that happiness somehow breaks through and comes to dwell with us.
I have found contentment and joy in being exactly where God wants me to be, and that is what makes me happy.
Happiness is an emotion based on positive circumstances within our lives. The origin of the word “happiness” was
derived from the same root “hap”, similar to the word “happening.” Depending on what's happening in our lives, we're either happy or sad. It's based on pure luck and good fortune.
If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
the gods seldom
give
but so quickly
take.