Quotes from Craig Keener

An important step in getting to know God is to realize how available he is to us. In learning to hear God, it helps us to take on faith the fact that we are already in his presence. If we must make ourselves worthy of his presence first, we will never get there.

That Jesus is popular in Mark 2:2, however, is not a general model for Christian ministry; the rest of Mark itself shows that eventually crowds denounced Jesus (15:13—14). From these narratives we might learn to use any popularity for good at the moment but not to count on it enduring.

One can never satisfy a closed mind.

If we must "feel" God's presence before we believe he is with us, we again reduce God to our ability to grasp him, making him an idol instead of acknowledging him as God.

I was valuing my survival more than sharing my faith.

Spiritual giftedness does not guarantee that we hear from God rightly on every point.

Revelation addresses many issues that have not changed because human nature and God's character have remained constant. It

Many of us who affirm and practice spiritual gifts would feel more comfortable among anticharismatics who are at least grounded in Scripture than among such flaky charismatics.

He does miracles when we need them—not for our entertainment or to make us feel "spiritual.

Until those charismatic churches who have poor teaching can supply both spiritual empowerment and sounder teaching, many of them will continue to be only a way station for Christians who need a fresh spiritual experience but who end up taking it elsewhere once they have it.

When one employs a method of verifying miracles that insists that they be replicable in controlled settings, yet regards as natural and nonmiraculous any event that is so replicable,[121] one has framed the method so as to secure the expected antisupernatural outcome.

If the early Christian accounts of dramatic signs make these works seem foreign and foreboding to segments of modern Western academia, they are nevertheless welcome in many of the dynamic churches of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, which believe that they share their experiences.