Seeds of faith are always within us; sometimes it takes a crisis to nourish and encourage their growth.

Faith gives us hope, so if faith is lost, hope flees away like mist in the wind. Loss of faith leads to loss of hope, which leads to despair. Life becomes pointless and without value.

The use of means ought not to lessen our faith in God, and our faith in God ought not to hinder our using whatever means He has given us for the accomplishment of His own purposes. —Hudson Taylor

belief creates your life, and that's what faith is: believing things that you haven't yet seen to the point that you act on them until they come into being. It is through faith that people experience personal growth and success.

Seeds of faith are always within us; sometimes it takes a crisis to nourish and encourage their growth. —SUSAN TAYLOR

All Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist.

people who believe in the resurrection, in God making a whole new world in which everything will be set right at last, are unstoppably motivated to work for that new world in the present.

To open the Bible is to open a window toward Jerusalem, as Daniel did (6:10), no matter where our exile may have taken us.

In fact, like most things in life that really matter—love, beauty, justice—you can't prove things in history the way you can prove Pythagoras's theorem. But there are lots of things you can be certain of nonetheless.

Ah, we think, God's kingdom is simply the sum total of all the souls who respond in faith to God's love. It isn't a real kingdom in space, time, and matter. It's a spiritual reality, "not of this world." John, though, will not collude with this Platonic shrinkage.

Albert Schweitzer, a century or more ago, used another strong image. Jesus, he said, was like a man convinced the wheel of history was going to turn in the opposite direction. He waited for this to happen, but it didn't. Then he threw himself upon the wheel, and it crushed him—but it did indeed start to turn in the other direction.

The ultimate future hope remains a surprise, partly because at present we only have images and metaphors for it, leaving us to guess that the reality will be far greater, and more surprising, still.