Christianity is intended to be a faith that is generous in a world that promotes scarcity, kind in a world that is harsh, generative where there is decay, healing where there is hurt, reconciling where there is division, and merciful and loving where there is hate.
-Raymond Chang
Category: Quotes (Page 4 of 10)
“A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying—lying to others and to yourself.”
Elder Zosima, in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Book II, Chapter 2
When it comes to hearing God, the Bible is the language of his heart. Nothing he says in any other way in any other context will ever override, undermine or contradict what he has said in the Scriptures. That’s why Jesus doesn’t just show up on the road to Emmaus and say, ‘Hi, it’s me!’ Instead, he takes considerable time to deliver a lengthy biblical exposition in which he reinterprets God’s Word radically, in the light of his own life, death and resurrection.
Pete Greig
How To Hear God (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2022), p. 36.
(I heard it on Lectio 365 for April 27)
‘It is Christ himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to him’
C.S. Lewis
The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol. 3: Narnia, Cambridge & Joy, 1950-1963, edited by Walter Hooper (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2007), p. 246.
“Loving, forgiving, and doing good to our adversaries is our duty. Yet we must do this without giving up and without being cowardly. We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel. We shall do so without fear, but also without pride and without hate.”
-from a sermon preached by André Trocmé the sunday after France fell to the German attack in World War II
“To Know God means to look like Him and to live in a way that reflects his character.”
Rikk Watts
When unsure and seeking God’s calling on your life, Ray Bakke advises:
Follow Jesus, start loving your neighbors, and somewhere in there your calling will come.
Rick Villodas reports a helpful question from Bishop Robert Barron to consider when trying to discern God’s will:
Which path makes me most generous?
Of course, being in a trusting community with other followers of Jesus who can be with us in discernment is so important!
We must understand that God does not “love” us without liking us – through gritted teeth – as “Christian” love is sometimes thought to do. Rather, out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self-renewed being, the heavenly Father cherishes the earth and each human being upon it. The fondness, the endearment, the unstintingly affectionate regard of God toward all his creatures is the natural outflow of what he is to the core – which we vainly try to capture with our tired but indispensable old word “love”.
– Dallas Willard
Andrew Walls has graduated on to that next level of existence that those of us who follow Jesus look forward to by faith. He was born in 1921! I never met him; but I heard him speak and read his books. He was quite a scholar of world Christianity, and I appreciated learning quite a lot from him. The Regent College Bookstore, where you can get audio of some classes that he taught there, shared a quote from him in its note on his passing. I think it is worth repeating, as an example of the orientation I found in his encouraging work.
“But since none of us can read the Scriptures without cultural blinkers of sorts, the great advantage, the crowning excitement which our own era of Church history has over all others, is the possibility that we may be able to read them together. Never before has the Church looked so much like the great multitude whom no man can number out of every nation and tribe and people and tongue. Never before, therefore, has there been so much potential for mutual enrichment and self-criticism, as God causes yet more light and truth to break forth from his word.”
Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (1996), pg.15
Rest in peace, Andrew Walls! Thank you for your excellent scholarship.
We would rather be ruined than changed.
– W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.