Best 3954 quotes in «church quotes» category

If one's firm faith and belief is that nothing is impossible, it would be hypocritical for the person to face a challenge and doubt that there would be a positive victorious ending.

If our mission is to share good news, we need to be good news people. If we preach transformation, we need to show some evidence of what transformation looks like.

If people think honoring pastors means doing everything they say, why don't they honor Jesus the same way?

If sickness brought glory God, Jesus would have spread disease, not healed it.

If that church is not adding value to your life, you may want to reconsider how often you go to church.

If the church is the body of Christ [who was disguised in servant form], why would we think the world would be able to pick us out of a crowd of other well-meaning organizations?

If the church doesn’t start fighting corruption, it will keep flourishing in the country

If the church is acceptable to this present age and is not suffering reproach, then it is not the true church that our Lord founded.

If the good news is an invitation to a Jesus way of life and not information about somebody who accomplished something on my behalf, I’m sunk. This is law and no gospel.

If there is any church service that you attend and it quickens your purpose and adds value to your life, if that church gives you some insight and understanding and a picture of how to do things better and become a solution provider to the problems of humanity in your country, then you can keep attending such a church.

If the universe does consist of a battle between the devil and God, the final analysis should conclude that religion would have been the devil’s most brilliant move and science, God’s.

If we are serious about climbing to higher ground, we will be found in church every Sunday—attending all of our meetings, partaking of the sacrament, participating in Sunday School, and contributing to the spirit found in Relief Society, Primary, and priesthood meetings.

If we are to transform painful crises into genuine breakthroughs, we must change the way we view conflict. Conflict avoidance and defensive reactions must be replaced with biblical insight and spiritual responsiveness.

If we ask a random orthodox religious person, what is the best religion, he or she would proudly claim his or her own religion to be the best. A Christian would say Christianity is the best, a Muslim would say Islam is the best, a Jewish would say Judaism is the best and a Hindu would say Hinduism is the best. It takes a lot of mental exercise to get rid of such biases.

If we in the church want a cause to fight, let’s fight sin. Let’s reveal its hideousness. Let’s show that Jeremiah was correct when e said: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” [Jeremiah 17:9 NKJV].

If we're going to impact our world in the name of Jesus, it will be because people like you and me took action in the power of the Spirit. Ever since the mission and ministry of Jesus, God has never stopped calling for a movement of "Little Jesuses" to follow him into the world and unleash the remarkable redemptive genius that lies in the very message we carry. Given the situation of the Church in the West, much will now depend on whether we are willing to break out of a stifling herd instinct and find God again in the context of the advancing kingdom of God.

If you are established in the church and focused on Jesus, then you are still among the living

If you aren't willing to fight for what you believe in, then you don't really believe in it. Faith is a verb.

If you are not one with us you divide the church. If you ever choose to miss another meeting you needn't come again.

If you are truly able to walk in the shoes of Christ, the very label of religion called Christianity would disappear from the face of earth.

If you can confess before a friend, you don't need a priest.

If you can't PRAY for the peace your church, PROMOTE the Christian doctrines, PREPARE for every good work and PROVIDE for the expansion of the Church, you are just like the PEWS (table and chairs) in the chapel.

If you have ever belonged to such a community, however, you may have discovered that the trouble starts when darkness falls on your life, which can happen in any number of unsurprising ways: you lose your job, your marriage falls apart, your child acts out in some attention getting way, you pray hard for something that does not happen, you begin to doubt some of the things you have been taught about what the Bible says. The first time you speak of these things in a full solar church, you can usually get a hearing. Continue to speak of them and you may be reminded that God will not let you be tested beyond your strength. All that is required of you is to have faith. If you still do not get the message, sooner or later it will be made explicit for you: the darkness is your own fault, because you do not have enough faith.

If you do not cultivate your life's environment, you will not captivate the worlds enlightenment.

If you perceive right you receive right. If you perceive wrong you receive wrong.

If your temper is violent towards your brothers and sisters in the Lord, whose kingdom are you trying to build?

If your church is not going to support the committed same-sex relationships of LGBT congregants, be honest about that. Bait-and-switch is deceptively un-Christ-like and serves to push gay and transgender believers farther away each time the deception happens.

If your altar is not active, your voice will not be strong

If you want to conquer fear then you have to put fear on your fears.

If you want to have a well-ordered church, then you have to become well-ordered yourself.

If you want to have a big and strong church, then you need to build a prayer wall of defense in the spiritual realm...

I had never met the Roman Catholuc Church outside of a history book. To come across it living, so to speak, was like finding a diplodocus.

I have heard of certain persons who have been in the habit of hearing a favorite minister, and when they go to another place, they say, "I cannot hear anybody after my own minister; I shall stay at home and read a sermon." Please remember the passage, "Not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together, as the manner of some is." Let me also entreat you not to be so foolishly partial as to deprive your soul of its food.... If you are not content to learn here a little and there a little, you will soon be half starved, and then you will be glad to get back again to the despised minister and pick up what his field will yield you.... Go and glean where the Lord has opened the gate for you. Why the text alone is worth the journey; do not miss it.

I have concluded that the more we seek the Lord, with a passion for His worthiness, the more we are gripped with our neediness. Adoration cultivates desperation.

-"I have kept the faith, Planchard." -"Then you are the only man who has" Planchard said, "and it is an heretical faith." -"They crucified Christ for heresy" Vexille said, "so to be named a heretic is to be one with Him.

I have no doubt that ignorance is the biggest obstacle facing the church of the lord Jesus Christ in this age

I have not learned a single lesson, been inspired or impacted by another person’s life void of negative experiences.

I have no objection to instruments of music in our worship, provided they are neither seen nor heard.

I left that church with rich and royal hatred of the priest as a person, and a loathing for the church as an institution, and I vowed that I would never go inside a church again. [Eugene V. Debs, describing his teenage reaction to a hellfire lecture by a priest]

I liked the idea of loving people just to love them, not to get them to come to church.

I hope the day will never come when the church abandons the “class meeting” and the prayer service . . .The old-fashioned “testimony” meeting should be revived, for through this medium we can share with others our faith and triumphs as well as our needs and mistakes.

I hope the likes, comments, retweets, money, hate, love, suffering, fame, pain and your education wont make you to deny God one day. Matthew 10:33

I'll always remember being called by my mother who beckoned me to look at the screen where a young man was being tortured by the church. Bag over his head, rolling on the ground, crying, suffocating, vomiting while the congression continues yelling chants, “God will save you!” treating him like the devil's child. It was the first time I’ve ever doubted God. First time I’ve ever heard the terms ‘Gays, and ‘Queers.’ I went through a lot in my childhood, but this was the first I’ve ever been so traumatized. My mom tells me they deserved it and the church tries to justify their actions as if it was the most intelligent excuse in the world. At 12 years old, I knew only one thing. I would never be like them.

I long for the Church to be more truly itself, and for me this involves changing its stance on war, sex, investment and many other difficult matters. I believe in all conscience that my questions and my disagreements are all of God. Yet I must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me—because what God asks of me is not to live in the ideal future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present, i.e., to be at home. "What if the project in question is myself, and not some larger social question such as war? At the end of the day, it is the central concern for most of us. We long to change and to grow, and we are rightly suspicious of those who are pleased with the way they are and cannot seem to conceive of changing any further. Yet the torture of trying to push away and overcome what we currently are or have been, the bitter self-contempt of knowing what we lack, the postponement of joy and peace because we cannot love ourselves now—these are not the building blocks for effective change. We constantly try to start from somewhere other than where we are. Truthful living involves being at home with ourselves, not complacently but patiently, recognizing that what we are today, at this moment, is sufficiently loved and valued by God to be the material with which he will work, and that the longed-for transformation will not come by refusing the love and the value that is simply there in the present moment. "So we come back, by a longish detour, to the point to which Mark's narrative brought us: the contemplative enterprise of being where we are and refusing the lure of a fantasized future more compliant to our will, more satisfying in the image of ourselves that it permits. Living in the truth, in the sense in which John's Gospel gives it, involves the same sober attention to what is there—to the body, the chair, the floor, the voice we hear, the face we see—with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings. Yet this is what it means to live in that kingdom where Jesus rules, the kingdom that has no frontiers to be defended. Our immersion in the present moment which is God's delivers the world to us—and that world is not the perfect and fully achieved thing we might imagine, but the divided and difficult world we actually inhabit. Only, by the grace of this living in the truth, we are able to say to it at least an echo of the 'yes' that God says, to accept as God accepts.

I looked up at the wall. My bachelor's degree had been in History. Films like Back to the Future and Quantum Leap had been some of my favorite programs. Could time travel really be possible? This seemed too unreal.

I love Religion it's the cheapest place to buy Guilt, Fear,Sin and Doubt

I made the fearful decision to head to Sydney, Australia, to study the Bible. My calling, my wife, Laura, my church, my passion—all were behind the scariest door of all time. Since that day, this remains exactly true: Fear never leaves. But the way we handle it can always change.

I long for a church that understands the dangers of entertainment and sees it for what is is: a lion crouching at the evangelical door, ready to devour us. We need a culture of evangelism that never sacrifices to the idolatry of entertainment, but serves up the rich fare found the gospel of Christ.

I'm a spiritual person, she said. "I believe in Allah, you know, though I don't always call It 'Allah' and I pray the way I want to pray. Sometimes I just look out at the stars and this love-fear thing comes over me, you know? And sometimes I might sit in a Christian church listening to them talk about Isa with a book of Hafiz in my hands instead of the hymnal. And you know what, Yusef? Sometimes, every once in a while, I get out my old rug and I pray like Muhammad prayed. I never learned the shit in Arabic and my knees are uncovered, but if Allah has a problem with that then what kind of Allah do we believe in?

In big ways and small, I knew exactly how selfish a war could make me, and I saw all around me how fear and need drove other people to terrible betrayals. Yet over and over, I also saw how war created a community, a people, and how that community was nourished by gestures of sharing. It was sharing that didn't depend on personal intimacy, and a community that didn't depend on everyone's being friends; it foreshadowed what I would come to understand as church, at its best.