Inspirational Quotes on Christianity

“Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless. It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold which is the human heart. It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent. To say that love is God is romantic idealism. To say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth. In the Christian sense, love is not primarily and emotion, but an act of the will. When Jesus us tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as well produce a cozy emotional feeling as you can a yawn or a sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means just leaving them alone. Thus in Jesus' terms we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them. In fact, liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends. When Jesus talked to the Pharisees, he didn't say, "There, there. Everything's going to be alright." He said, "You brood of vipers! How can you speak good when you are evil!" And he said that to them because he loved them. This does not mean that liking may not be a part of loving, only that it doesn't have to be. Sometimes liking follows on the heels of loving. It is hard to work for somebody's well-being very long without coming in the end to rather like him too.”

“We think, 'God, when You part the river, I'll go.' God says, "Go, and I'll part the river.”

“I hear people saying to me: 'When is it going to get easier?' When you die. Warfare is a normal New Testament Christian posture. Get used to it.”

“Yet Jesus Christ says he is standing knocking at the door of our lives, waiting. Notice that he is standing at the door, not pushing it; speaking to us, not shouting. This is all the more remarkable when we reflect that the house is his in any case. He is the architect; he designed it. He is the builder; he made it. He is the landlord; he bought it with his own blood. So it is his by right of plan, construction, and purchase. We are only tenants in a house that does not belong to us. He could put his shoulder to the door; he prefers to put his hand on the knocker. He could command us to open to him; instead, he merely invites us to do so. He will not force an entry to anybody's life. He says (verse 18) 'I counsel you.' He could issue orders; he is content to give advice. This is the nature of his humility and the extent of the freedom he has given us.”

“It is undoubtedly the case (and considerations advanced in the first sub-section have prepared us for this conclusion) that the election does in some sense denote the basis of all the relationships between God and man, between God in His very earliest movement towards man and man in his very earliest determination by this divine movement. it is in the decision in favour of this movement, in God’s self-determination and the resultant determination of man, in the basic relationship which is enclosed and fulfilled within Himself, that God is who He is.”

“Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. To be a Christian one must take up his cross, with all its difficulties and agonizing and tension-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leaves its mark upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way which comes only through suffering.”

“I’m looking for a second reformation. The first reformation of the church 500 years ago was about beliefs. This one is going to be about behavior. The first one was about creeds. This one is going to be about deeds. It is not going to be about what does the church believe, but about what is the church doing.”

“There may be a theology without the Scriptures — a theology of nature, gathered by painful, and slow, and sometimes doubtful processes from what man sees around him in external nature and the course of history, and what he sees within him of nature and of grace. In like manner there may be and has been an astronomy of nature, gathered by man in his natural state without help from aught but his naked eyes, as he watched in the fields by night. But what is this astronomy of nature to the astronomy that has become possible through the wonderful appliances of our observatories? The Word of God is to theology as, but vastly more than, these instruments are to astronomy. It is the instrument which so far increases the possibilities of the science as to revolutionize it and to place it upon a height from which it can never more descend. What would be thought of the deluded man, who, discarding the new methods of research, should insist on acquiring all the astronomy which he would admit, from the unaided observation of his own myopic and astigmatic eyes? Much more deluded is he who, neglecting the instrument of God’s Word written, would confine his admissions of theological truth to what he could discover from the broken lights that play upon external nature, and the faint gleams of a dying or even a slowly reviving light, which arise in his own sinful soul. Ah, no! The telescope first made a real science of astronomy possible: and the Scriptures form the only sufficing source of theology.”

“If we could live a thousand years, and experience a thousand relationships in the thousand times and places and cultures, perhaps we wouldn’t need books in order to (eventually) become wise. But our lives are short, and God has been merciful to give us many places, many times, many cultures, and many experiences distilled into books. Find the ones that strengthen your faith and make you want to live all-out for God.”