Best 4545 quotes in «christianity quotes» category

It will not, however, affect one tiny bit the question of whether the text has a literal meaning because—mark this—every biblical text has a literal meaning. Many people are stunned to hear this. That is because many people think a "literal meaning" can only be conveyed by literal language. They make the mistake of assuming that an author who uses metaphor, fiction, hyperbole, or various other figures of speech does not have a literal meaning. Thus, for instance, if I say "my heart is broken", some people mistakenly imagine that I "meant nothing literally." But, of course, I do. I literally mean I am deeply grieved and I am expressing that grief via a metaphor. Likewise, if I say "I stood in line for a million years" I am using an exaggeration to communicate another literal meaning: I waited a long time. Indeed, more often than not, metaphor is exactly the right vehicle for conveying a literal meaning and is far better than nonfigurative language. The shortest distance between two minds is a figure of speech. -- Making Senses of Scripture

It would be unjust toward children to introduce them to Christian teaching and existence only as little pagans and catechumens, in order to leave it up to them to choose the Faith on their own responsibility at a point in time difficult to determine.

I used to be afraid of the dark until I learned that I am light and the dark is afraid of me.

I've been a Christian since I was a little girl. But my Christianity is a muddy mess of thoughts and opinions and making God into what works for me-like going shopping at the mall and picking out whatever I want, putting together faith like I would an outfit. Somehow I don't think the Creator, the I AM, the savior of the world is something we can mix and match to out liking.

I've heard of such a legend!' I gasped. 'A child descended from a union between Christ and Mary Magdalene!' 'Don't be so fucking stupid,' snorted Mons. 'There's hundreds of those!

I’ve heard so many people, particularly people of faith, say they could look past his wrongdoings. When they’re pressed further, the reply is always some variation of “He doesn’t mean what he says,” “It’s just to get a rise out of people,” or “It’s all for show.” When you turn a blind eye and a deaf ear and say nothing, you are in fact saying everything. You are telling others you approve of immorality and injustice. You are telling them you support the marginalization and vilification of those who are different from you. You are telling them that fear reigns supreme and that you will tolerate nefarious behavior. As President John F. Kennedy said in a speech: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crises, maintain their neutrality.” - Amy Erickson

I've learned that sometimes during these lengthy times of waiting on God to show up, we can gain comfort by looking at the bigger picture because history proves that the bigger the suffering, the bigger the opportunity for God to really show off.

I’ve never much liked the whole setup of Christianity, with its emphasis on being saved, thereby acknowledging a debt that can only be paid by a lifetime of sacrifice and devotion. Must God’s love have strings attached? People who crave salvation should think about how they’re going to feel if it turns out that this God who saved them is, upon closer acquaintance, completely alien. He, possibly she (or, more likely, it), is not now and never has been one of us. Jesus clearly was not one of us, with his crypto-stories about the prodigal who is more beloved by the father than the dutiful son and the sliding pay scale for field hands, with his magic powers that run the gamut from improving the wedding beverage to blasting trees to raising the dead. These days we have born-agains everywhere, even in the White House, carping about how clear and meaningful everything is now that they’ve seen the light and accepted Christ as their Savior. There they were, just sinning along aimlessly, drinking and fornicating down that slippery slope lined with good intentions and ending you know where, when suddenly Jesus reached out and down or across and saved them. And now they feel grateful all the time, every day. It things go wrong, that’s God’s way of testing their faith, and if they are successful and make lots of money, that proves they have been chosen by God. It's supposed to be all about free will, but there’s not much freedom in it. And if God is really so eager to save the desperate from themselves, where was he when my mother was knocking back the Seconal with her lunatic girlfriend from hell.

I've never fully understood how Christianity became quite so tame and respectable, given its origins among drunkards, prostitutes, and tax collectors....Jesus could have hung out in the high-end religious scene of his day, but instead he scoffed at all that, choosing instead to laugh at the powerful, befriend whores, kiss sinners, and eat with all the wrong people. He spent his time with people for whom life was not easy. And there, amid those who were suffering, he was the embodiment of perfect love.

I’ve tried everything else, I’ll try God.“- Cherie.

I’ve seen a disobedient client simply turn his attention toward The Adversary and ask “Are You still there?” and suddenly all was made well between them.

I’ve realized, though, we can either choose to be vulnerable or have moments of vulnerability sneak up on us. Like when you’re happily alone, strutting around your house naked, but then hear a sound. Suddenly, the comfort and confidence you felt in your own skin evaporates. You run to the nearest room, hurrying to shut the door. Then you wait, and listen quietly for an opportunity to make an escape. Your mind races trying to think of an excuse for your current nude state. You’re embarrassed. But, if you live your life listening for the Lord, obeying when He asks you to be vulnerable, you never have to worry about being walked in on. Your soul is ready to be seen. And, He won’t allow your life to be marked by shame or embarrassment.

I wanna be so consumed with the love of Christ that it flows into every aspect of my life.

I ville, at vi skal være Christne, og I ville selv ikke være det. Men, hvis I ville ikke være Christne, saa værer i det ringeste Mennisker. Handle med os i det ringeste ligesom I ingen anden Religion havde end den, som Naturens Lys dicterer.

I wanted to stand on the kind of holy ground that wasn't curated by church professionals, where a burning bush could blaze forth in defiance of safety regulations and outside of regular office hours.

I want to affirm that thinking and living, knowing and doing, theory and practice intersect.

I want to commune with Christ and live in His fullness or I don't want anything to do with Christianity. I want all God has to offer.

I want to grow old with you. I want your face to be the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night. I want to feel my children growing inside you. Sarah, my love. I want to worship the Lord with you, and hear your laughter until the day I die.

I was always exceedingly delighted with that saying of Chrysostom, "The foundation of our philosophy is humility"; and yet more pleased with that of Augustine: "As the orator, when asked, What is the first precept in eloquence? answered, Delivery: What is the second? Delivery: What is the third? Delivery: so if you ask me concerning the precepts of the Christian religion, I will answer, first, second, and third, Humility.

I want you to wrestle with the Bible. Do it. Wrestle until, Jacob-like, you walk with a limp ever after, and you receive the blessing of the Lord.

I was going to stop pretending that just because we were in ministry we were perfect. I was tired of wearing the mask of ministry, and knew that I needed to start living the life.

I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance.

I was enraged by these heinous acts of barbarism - enraged that people who called themselves Muslims could launch an unprovoked attack on Christians or foreigners, enraged that through their vile acts these terrorists were perverting our faith, which tells us that Christians are among the "people of the Book", that we should show discernment when fighting for the cause of God and not fight those who have not harmed us, that murder and suicide are grievous sins.

I was devastated to learn that both my parents were facing persecution and insults from the entire family. They had failed to raise me to follow the “right path.” The fact that I was adopted was cited as a reason, I was told. Town gossips gleefully whispered juicy details about my misdeeds and my parents’ equally horrific failure to raise their only son to be a good Shia Muslim. The fact that my dear parents were being judged and persecuted felt worse than anything anyone could have done to me personally. It was second only to their desperate pleas with me to label my decisions as mere crimes of passion...

I was once in captivity but now I am saved by grace.

I was just as black as I had been the day that I was born. Therefore, when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike. When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. Were only Negroes to gain this crown? Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto?

I was once in darkness, but now, I see a bright light on my path.

I was once in darkness, but now, the light of God has shone upon me.

I wasn't there yet, I wasn't finding joy and gladness in my barrenness, but I believed I would. I believed He would make my barren soul as beautiful as His perfect garden.

I was so tired of this ceaseless, day-to-day tug-of-war between my hormones and my head, my vanity and my virtue. I felt very much as though I were caught in the middle of some dreadful battle in which taking a side of my own would mean certain misery in either case.

I was taught growing up not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers, to withdraw myself from the sinful 'others'. But we are all others. We are all sinners in someone's eyes.

I wish you a blessed beautiful Christmas with the fullness of grace.

I went into a forest into a plain, and the trees took counsel- And said, Come, let us go and make war against the sea that it may depart away before us, and that we may make us more woods. The floods of the sea also in like manner took counsel, and said, Come, let us go up and subdue the woods of the plain, that there also we may make us another country. The thought of the wood was in vain, for the fire came and consumed it. The thought of the floods of the sea came likewise to nought, for the sand stood up and stopped them. If thou wart judge now betwixt these two, whom would thou begin to justify? or whom would thou condemn?

I will be a fisher of souls!

I will admit that we as young rebels always wanted fundamentalists to understand our take on their religion, but rarely, if ever, the other way around. The fundamentalists are the real artists. If you saw only a masterpiece of an original painting and someone threw a splash of red across it saying that their version is better, you would be offended too.

I will live each minute in gratitude.

I wonder if anyone who needs a snappy song service can really appreciate the meaning of the cross.

I wonder what could happen if self-confessed followers of Jesus surrendered our human powers, and our desires for power, and began to celebrate openly our human weakness in exchange for the experience of Christ as Power within us. What could happen if, for Christ's sake, we openly delighted in our weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties?

Joy is God's smile; love is God's laughter.

I woke up to singing and found myself singing too

Listening to the debates about public schools on the Christian Right, one hears plenty of opposing opinions and a great deal of confusion. Some want to change the schools, others want to leave them. But the smart money seems to know what it is doing. It provides support for programs like the Good News Club, which slowly erode the support for public education in the country at large and in their own constituency in particular. And then it lays the groundwork for dismantling public education in favor of a private system of religious education funded by the state.

Live life to the fullest or foolest.

Live life in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Living according to God's truth means that my ego must die, and I must live entirely for God and for my neighbors. Living according to God's truth means not following the crowd and not being dismayed when even your friends misunderstand you. For the God whom you serve will have the final word. On the day of judgement he will speak the final word over the whole of your life.

Long before something happens in our life, it happened in our heart.

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings. I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.

Look at yourself! You're a priest. You know damn well that if I were setting out to make a girl at this moment instead of young Paolo, you'd take an entirely different view. You'd disapprove, sure! You'd read me a lecture on fornication and all the rest. But you wouldn't be too unhappy. I'd be normal... according to nature! But I am not made like that. God didn't make me like that. But do I need love the less? Do I need satisfaction less? Have I less right to live in contentment because somewhere along the line the Almighty slipped a cog in creation?... What's your answer to that Meredith? What's your answer for me? Tie a knot in myself and take up badminton and wait till they make me an angel in heaven, where they don't need this sort of thing any more? I'm lonely! I need love like the next man! My sort of love!

Looking at your day from a “golden day” perspective helps you prioritize.

Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.” Note the “I Am.” In the Greek it is the strongest possible form of expression – Ego Eimi. Both ego and eimi mean “I am” but the former puts the emphasis on the “I” while the latter puts it on the “am.” Taken together they are the strongest Greek form to express the name of God as the great “I AM.” That is how the risen Christ here refers to Himself. “Lo, I AM with you!” But there is a lovely feature in the Greek construction here which does not reveal itself in our English translation. It reads like this: “And lo, I with you AM…” You and I dear fellow believer, are in between the “I” and the “AM.” He is not only with us, He is all around us. Not only now and then, but “always” which literally translated is, “all the days” … this day, this hour, this moment. Why, when we reflect on it, were not our Lord’s sudden appearings & disappearings during the 40 days between His resurrection and His ascension meant to teach those early disciples (and ourselves) this very thing, that even when He is invisible He is none the less present, hearing, watching, knowing, sympathizing, overruling? Let us never forget that the special promise of His presence is given in connection with our going forth as winners of others to Him.

Lord grant me a humble spirit and a willing heart.