Best 479 quotes in «holiness quotes» category

Be determined to live a pure, holy and godly life; decide to honor, love and value other people, and to live a life that reflects Christ to others

Being holistic doesn't mean mumbling mystical mumbo-jumbo all the time, it means seeing the reality as it is, without giving in to either supernatural nonsense or intellectual arrogance.

Be whole and the world will be peaceful and progressive.

Be ye holy, for I am holy.’ It is as if God said, Holiness is my blessedness and my glory: without this you cannot, in the very nature of things, see me or enjoy me. Holiness is my blessedness and my glory: there is nothing higher to be conceived; I invited you to share with me in it, I invite you to likeness to myself: ‘Be ye holy, for I am holy.’ Is it not enough, has it no attraction, does it not move and draw you mightily, the hope of being with me, partakers of my Holiness? I have nothing better to offer—I offer you myself: ‘Be holy, for I am holy.’ Shall we not cry earnestly to God to show us the glory of His Holiness, that our souls may be made willing to give everything in response to this wondrous call? [. . .] In the deepest meaning of the words: where God enters to rest, there He sanctifies. [. . .] It is as we enter into the rest of God that we become partakers of His Holiness. [. . .] Rest belongeth unto God: He alone can give it, by making us share His own. [. . .] He had been known to Abraham as God Almighty, the God of Promise (Ex. vi. 3 ). He would now manifest Himself as Jehovah, the God of Fulfilment [. . .]

I feel that my fingers have brushed one of life’s deep, coursing threads…Speak, even notice it, and it would disappear.

But saints and angels behold that glory of God which consists in the beauty of His holiness; and it is this sight only that will melt and humble the hearts of men, wean them from the world, draw them to God, and effectually change them. A sight of the awful greatness of God may overpower men's strength, and be more than they can endure; but if the moral beauty of God be hid, the enmity of the heart will remain in its full strength. No love will be enkindled; the will, instead of being effectually gained, will remain inflexible. But the first glimpse of the moral and spiritual glory of God shining into the heart produces all these effects as it were with omnipotent power, which nothing can withstand.

Burying oneself in holy books and traditions, doesn't bring holiness, what does is, losing oneself in the service of others.

But the guarding of our desires is more than fighting a rear-guard defensive action against temptations from the world, the flesh, and the devil. We must take the offensive. Paul directs us to set our hearts on things above, that is, on spiritual values (Colossians 3:1).

But the only thing that is important is, Am I loving God and growing holy every day?

Both glory and dominion last forever but glory is for God and dominion is for mankind.

But God has not called us to be like those around us. He has called us to be like Himself. Holiness is nothing less than conformity to the character of God.

But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you, So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.

But that is the nature of true grace and spiritual light, that it opens to a person's view the infinite reason there is that he should be holy in a high degree. And the more grace he has, and the more this is opened to view, the greater sense he has of the infinite excellency and glory of the divine Being, and of the infinite dignity of the person of Christ, and the boundless length and breadth and depth and height of the love of Christ to sinners. And as grace increases, the field opens more and more to a distant view, until the soul is swallowed up with the vastness of the object, and the person is astonished to think how much it becomes him to love this God and this glorious Redeemer that has so loved man, and how little he does love. And so the more he apprehends, the more the smallness of his grace and love appears strange and wonderful: and therefore he is more ready to think that others are beyond him.

But that is all prayer requires: faith, hope, and love. Great holiness, or piety, or sanctity are not required. Prayer is a road to holiness.

But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I’m with him almost all day and night- little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel like we’re taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it’s too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means. I play music for him, the most encompassing and quiet I can find: Couperin, Vivaldi, the British soprano Lesley Garret singing arias he loved, especially the duet from Lakme: music of freedom, diving, floating. How can this be written? Shouldn’t these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in a hurricane? All that afternoon he looks out at us though a little space in his eyes, but I know he sees and registers: I know that he’s loving us, actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that. I bring all the animals, and then I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on. The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes. There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface- as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on. I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living’s so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love’s deepest reality- where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents. All the love in the world goes with you.

Curiously enough, it is a fear of how grace will change and improve them that keeps many souls away from God. They want God to take them as they are and let them stay that way. They want Him to take away their love of riches, but not their riches—to purge them of the disgust of sin, but not of the pleasure of sin. Some of them equate goodness with indifference to evil and think that God is good if He is broad-minded or tolerant about evil. Like the onlookers at the Cross, they want God on their terms, not His, and they shout, “Come down, and we will believe.” But the things they ask are the marks of a false religion: it promises salvation without a cross, abandonment without sacrifice, Christ without his nails. God is a consuming fire; our desire for God must include a willingness to have the chaff burned from our intellect and the weeds of our sinful will purged. The very fear souls have of surrendering themselves to the Lord with a cross is an evidence of their instinctive belief in His Holiness. Because God is fire, we cannot escape Him, whether we draw near for conversion or flee from aversion: in either case, He affects us. If we accept His love, its fires will illumine and warm us; if we reject Him, they will still burn on in us in frustration and remorse.

Careful practical work is the best expression of our freedom and safeguard of our sanity. In a healthy society, such work is the means most consistently available for people to practice holiness of life, to imitate God's enabling and sustaining care for the world.

Character that is fruit-producing can be summed up in the mastery of these 5 qualities: morals, but a sense of humor; love, but respect for criticism; intelligence without pretense; humility without self-loathing; and a mind open, but with solid convictions.

Christians should seek after holiness—without which no man shall see the Lord. Let us seek ardently the kind of life that reflects the beauty of Jesus and marks us as being what saints ought to be!

Conscious minds can, at the most, comprehend that the whole idea of a 'God' is his superiority, his omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience; and therefore, at the least, desire him, someone far greater than themselves.

Consideration of others extends beyond just other human beings to include all things—tables, cushions, even toilet paper. We must be considerate of all things and treat them with great appreciation and respect.

Culture and holiness must be made compatible in the environment of the kingdom

Change – real change – starts at the core of your being; it starts when you encounter the One who created you and you can no longer stand any essence of yourself that varies from His holiness.

Cleanliness begins with love for godliness

Compassion is not complete in itself, but must be accompanied by inflexible justice and wrath against sin and a desire for holiness.

Do not defile your body. It is a temple for the Holy spirit to dwell.

Dismally enough, some of us are insecure in such a way that we cannot bear the thought of the sovereignty of God, the thought of His Being as greater than ourselves; it moves us into feelings of insignificance. Nonetheless, allow me to personally and peacefully maintain that if I were to worship and obey anything, I would like it far greater than myself or any person or human system, preferably to a point where it, in all its majesty, makes me feel lost and even 'creatural' in my basic humanity. Only this God - He who is great beyond human measure, yet still considers His creation precious - I find to be more than worthy of praise; otherwise, I bow down and worship nothing. And if the thought of such a superior and almighty God were to indeed offend me, I would have to remember that it is because I am only as significant as the things which I am idolizing, things which are ultimately separating me, the creation, from my ultimate Creator.

Divine self is holy being.

Every being, created by God and unspoiled by man, is perfect, strictly defined and autonomous, entirely complete and at the same time with a built-in ability to grow and develop. This is the essence of its dignity and holiness. It is not an embodiment of God’s immense Personality, but only one of the realisations of His perfection.

Don't live your whole life on holy crutches.

Don’t take the holiness of God lightly, for it is the very essence of His character.

Energy work is priceless. It makes every day extraordinary and transforms the mundane to the holy.

Food is part of God's creating. A right relationship with food points us toward Him.... The table is not only a place where we can become present to God. The table is also a place where He becomes present to us.

For lack of knowledge of the Holy One, we perish in sin of hell.

Forming Holiness with filthy hands and heart which leads to a disastrous future is like trying to impress or form when your life is without formation.

For a message to be holy, it doesn't need to come from a prophet or a deity. When truth is spoken whoever is the mediator it is divine.

For the glory of God, the good of others, and the satisfaction of our souls, the aim of the Christian life is our coming to share in…Christlikeness or godliness—which is ‘holiness’ rightly understood.

From the experience of these years Dr. Lloyd-Jones was immovably confirmed in a truth which he had first seen in the New Testament. It was that evangelism is pre-eminently dependent upon the quality of the Christian life which is known and enjoyed in the church.

From Adam's day until now men everywhere have tried to find their own way to meet God's standard of holiness. Has anyone been successful? No!

God is not a God of confusion, although at times one's judgment, for a period, may become clouded in the mi(d)st of one's growth process. I stopped fooling myself into thinking that Christ is always for the cool kids and never for those upright and uptight religious people everybody hates.

Gnosticism, a highly intellectual second-century movement (the word ‘gnostic’ comes from the Greek word for ‘knowledge’) that was later declared heretical, didn’t help. Heretics were intellectual therefore intellectuals were, if not heretical, then certainly suspect. So ran the syllogism. Intellectual simplicity or, to put a less flattering name on it, ignorance was widely celebrated. The biography of St Antony records with approval that he ‘refused to learn to read and write or to join in the silly games of the other little children’. Education and silly games are here bracketed together, and both are put in opposition to holiness. Instead of this, we learn, Antony ‘burned with the desire for God’. That this wasn’t quite true – Antony’s letters reveal a much more careful thinker than this implies – didn’t much matter: it appealed to a powerful ideal. No need to read: give up both books and bread and you will win God’s favour. Even intellectuals were susceptible to this pretty picture: it was hearing about how the simple, unlettered Antony had inspired so many to turn to Christ that led Augustine to start striking himself on the head, tearing his hair and asking, ‘What is wrong with us?’ Ignorance was power.

God called us to live a holy life by his grace.

God does not require a perfect, sinless life to have fellowship with Him, but He does require that we be serious about holiness, that we grieve over sin in our lives instead of justifying it, and that we earnestly pursue holiness as a way of life.

God is spirit. The spirit dwells in a body. We are the Holy temple.

God loves each person, I believe; although, just like we do in our private homes, He reserves His kingdom only for those whom He enjoys.

God's holiness is not an unloving holiness, and God's love is not an unholy love. It is only by keeping these two primary moral qualities of the divine being closely related that we may rightly behold the character of God. (p. 98)

God will never disappoint us. He loves us and has only one purpose for us : holiness, which in His kingdom equals joy.

Glory to God in the holy highest heavens.

God can use impure vessels to serve his holiness

God cares about our dietary choices. This should come as no surprise; you only have to read the first two chapters of Genesis to see God's concern for food. Humanity's first sin was disobedience manifested in a choice about eating. Adam and Eve were allowed to eat anything they wanted, except the one fruit they chose. And the New Testament makes clear that God cares about the most basic quotidian aspect of our lives. (Our God, after all, is the God who provides for the sparrows and numbers the hairs on our heads.) This God who is interested in how we speak, how we handle our money, how we carry our bodies - He is also interested in how we live with food.