Christianity Quotes
Fulton J. Sheen
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.
C.S. Lewis
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
Augustine of Hippo
Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.
Bob Dylan
You're gonna have to serve somebody; well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody...
David Attenborough
I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…
Bart D. Ehrman
One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary.
Karl Rahner
When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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.
Fulton J. Sheen
Once you have surrendered yourself, you make yourself receptive. In receiving from God, you are perfected and completed.
C.S. Lewis
I do not think there is a demonstrative proof (like Euclid) of Christianity, nor of the existence of matter, nor of the good will and honesty of my best and oldest friends. I think all three are (except perhaps the second) far more probable than the alternatives. The case for Christianity in general is well given by Chesterton…As to why God doesn't make it demonstratively clear; are we sure that He is even interested in the kind of Theism which would be a compelled logical assent to a conclusive argument? Are we interested in it in personal matters? I demand from my friend trust in my good faith which is certain without demonstrative proof. It wouldn't be confidence at all if he waited for rigorous proof. Hang it all, the very fairy-tales embody the truth. Othello believed in Desdemona's innocence when it was proved: but that was too late. Lear believed in Cordelia's love when it was proved: but that was too late. 'His praise is lost who stays till all commend.' The magnanimity, the generosity which will trust on a reasonable probability, is required of us. But supposing one believed and was wrong after all? Why, then you would have paid the universe a compliment it doesn't deserve. Your error would even so be more interesting and important than the reality. And yet how could that be? How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?
Mark Buchanan
Sometimes doubting is not a lack of faith, but an expression of it. Sometimes to doubt is to merely insist that God be taken seriously not frivolously, to insist that our faith is placed in and upheld by something other than seeming conjuring tricks.
Louise Bélanger
Prayer opens the doorFor God to work in our livesPrayer is to be our firstResponse to everythingWhen you start your dayGive Him your first wordsGive Him your first moment
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sooner or later I will be faced with the fact that the world is helpless to meet my needs. And at that point, I will be left with two conclusions; that life is cruel or God is real.
Father Dioscuros
But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself. And unless you begin to know yourself, how can you even begin to search for God?
Dr Paul Gitwaza
Our problems sometimes show the degree of our relationship with God.
John Piper
Your mind was made to know and love God.
Frederick Buechner
Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.
Frederick Buechner
If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe. We would lose our freedom not to believe. And in the very moment that we lost that freedom, we would cease to be human beings. Our love of God would have been forced upon us, and love that is forced is of course not love at all. Love must be freely given. Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks. Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt.
John Ortberg
If we are serious about loving God, we must begin with people, all people. And especially we must learn to love those that the world generally discards.
John Ortberg
Every day you and I walk through God's shop. Every day we brush up against objects of incalculable worth to Him. People. Every one of them carries a price tag, if only we could see it.
W.B. Yeats
The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of my world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as their own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other moments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed this thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow.
Don Cupitt
The Servant who really studies his Master gradually becomes like his master; gradually learns that he himself is the one who in the end does all the work and has all the power.
Jack Tanner
The secret message of Christianity is not that we are to worship God, but that we are to become gods.
Michael Bassey Johnson
You can believe in whatsoever you like, but the truth remains the truth, no matter how sweet the lie may taste.
Peter Kreeft
Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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.
Sandra Chami Kassis
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!!
Jean-Yves Leloup
If you are a Buddhist, inspire yourself by thinking of the bodhisattva. If you are a Christian, think of the Christ, who came not to be served by others but to serve them in joy, in peace, and in generosity. For these things, these are not mere words, but acts, which go all the way, right up to their last breath. Even their death is a gift, and resurrection is born from this kind of death. (157)
Sadie Robertson
I want you to realize that your being alive is significant and that there is a reason you are here. Even if you feel lifeless, worthless, or empty right now, God has put life in you because there is something in you that the world is craving. You bring something to the table of life that nobody else brings. You are valuable and loved. And I believe, contrary to how you may feel right now, that the life God has for you is exciting and meant to be lived to its fullest.
Sadie Robertson
You don’t have to look like a champion to be a legend.
Sadie Robertson
Even if your world feels dark right now, the darkness has not and never will overcome the light!
Sadie Robertson
If you let what you believe about yourself—and what other people believe about you—define your life, that would be a tragedy. You’ll never find out what you’re capable of. But your life can change the world when you start believing good things for yourself.
Sadie Robertson
My takeaway from this is that no matter what I step into or what my day looks like, I can be joyful. Because I know my God is holy, I can publicly honor and praise Him as I celebrate each day.
Sadie Robertson
Remember, when we spend our time trying to measure up, striving to paint a picture of ourselves in order to feel accepted or to impress others or to be liked, we will always feel empty. That’s the world’s way to live. But when we fill ourselves with eternal truth that we can stand on forever, we will walk taller, live more boldly, and be steadfast in the knowledge of who we are because of who God is in us.
Sadie Robertson
If you believe you belong in a certain space, you will likely become what is expected of you. But with one touch of hope, your life can be changed.
Sadie Robertson
A touch and a word from Jesus can change everything about your life. Do not settle for what it looks like right now or for what others believe about you or for what may have been spoken over you. There is life and hope in the promises of God.
Sadie Robertson
Remember, God created us because He wanted a relationship with us. Go read Psalm 139 if you are doubting that. God knew you before you were formed in your mother’s womb, He saw you, He has always had a plan for you, and your life was written in His book before you took your first breath.
Sadie Robertson
The very nature of God is unity. He is three in one: Father, Son, and Spirit. Since the very beginning of creation, God formed human life so that we could be in a relationship with Him.
Sadie Robertson
Now, sisters and friends, I want you to do something. Go look in the mirror. Take off any worldly lens that has affected the way you see yourself—a lens of insecurity, jealousy, comparison, negativity, self-hatred, or anything else. And stare at yourself. You are altogether beautiful, my darling. Wow, the Lord takes such great delight in you. Look at the color of your eyes. Look at the strands of your hair and the unique shapes and features of your face. God made you, and you are exactly how He intended you to be. He created every detail—details no other person on earth has. He did this so He could reveal a new image of beauty and another side of Himself to the world.
Tyler Edwards
The truth is, the Devil's job is easy.
Frederica Mathewes-Green
As I ponder my pilgrim’s progress to Orthodoxy, however, I realize that I didn’t make the trip alone, but in a two-seater. And I wasn’t the one driving.
Carl Raschke
Jesus’s use of the phrasing a new commandment is frequently scanted in light of its implicit ramifications. Because Jesus at the Last Supper has executed the new covenant with his disciples, the Great Commandment itself now acquires an unprecedented meaning. Its new meaning belongs to this sudden revelation not merely about who God is but also about what love is. Previously the Great Commandment bade us to love God and our neighbor. Now this love can be comprehended only in an incarnational situation. Its incarnate presence is the activation of profound rhizomic relations that explode from the center toward the ends of the earth. We are commanded to be incarnational in relation to one another just as God at the cross was incarnational in Christ. . . . We are no longer simply Christ’s followers" - the pre-Easter form of relation to a master-and-teacher that is conventionally called disciple - but also perpetual Christ incarnators . . .
Lailah Gifty Akita
May you find the strength of will and the grace of endurance to overcome every challenge.
Bear Grylls
Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since.I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since.But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen.As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal.But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong.Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant.The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too.The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up.I mean, what does a child know about faith?It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known.Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about.Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg.I was devastated.I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life.‘Please, God, comfort me.’Blow me down … He did.My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.)To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies.This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes.The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life.This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being.Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree.I had found a calling for my life.
Swindoll Charles R.
If you allow it, [suffering] can be the means by which God brings you His greatest blessings.
Aaron Kyle Andresen
I believe in the teachings of the man many people believe is the savior of Earth souls, Jesus Christ.
VaeEshia Ratcliff-Davis
The great conquest of life is to truly love the One True God before actually seeing him.
Criss Jami
There's no scarcity of lukewarm believers who, by cultural standards, deem themselves far too cool, and therefore wean themselves a bit too cowardly, to live as fiery Christians.
Paula Carter
Sometimes I try to pray, late at night when I am unable to sleep, my bed hot from my body and me tossing and turning. It's hard not to pray in a rehearsed way, and I can feel myself perform a routine even in my most desperate moments: "Oh Lord, please help me do X or feel Y." So I try to sink back into myself, to a self that is unaware of church and religion, to a more primal self. I imagine God as the night sky, not a man or even a person, and then I try just to be me, to be real, to experience my humanity with God as a witness.
Anne Dayton
Somewhere along the line, I had bought into the idea, so pervasive in evangelical culture, that reading the right books and listening to the right music will make you ("inspire you to be") a better Christian. Somehow, I had confused the trappings of faith with faith itself.