Quotes about Jesus

Absolute ideals and absolute grace: after learning that dual message from Russian novelists, I returned to Jesus and found that it suffuses his teaching throughout the Gospels and especially in the Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus, who did not sin, also felt pain.

I can worry myself into a state of spiritual ennui over questions like What good does it do to pray if God already knows everything? Jesus silences such questions: he prayed, so should we.

Followers of Jesus stake their claim on the firm belief that God will one day heal the planet of pain and death. Until that day arrives, the case against God must rely on incomplete evidence. We cannot really reconcile our pain-wracked world with a loving God because what we experience now is not the same as what God intends. Jesus himself prayed that God's will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, a prayer that will not be fully answered until evil and suffering are finally defeated.

Often a work of God comes with two edges, great joy and great pain, and in that matter-of-fact response Mary embraced both. She was the first person to accept Jesus on His own terms, regardless of the personal cost.

According to Jesus, what I think about him and how I respond will determine my destiny for all eternity.

Whatever you may believe about it, the birth of Jesus was so important that it split history into two parts. Everything that has ever happened on this planet falls into a category of before Christ or after Christ.

Some people worry that prayer may lead to passivity, that we will retreat to prayer as a substitute for action. Jesus saw no contradiction between the two: he spent long hours in prayer and then long hours meeting human needs.

Jesus' story makes no economic sense, and that was his intent. He was giving us a parable about grace, which cannot be calculated like a day's wages. Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is about not counting.

From Jesus I learn that, whatever activism I get involved in, it must not drive out love and humility, or otherwise I betray the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus did not eliminate evil; he revealed a God willing, at immense cost, to forgive it and to heal its damage.

Jesus was not crucified for being a good citizen, for being just a little nicer than everyone else. The powers of his day correctly saw him and his followers as subversives because they took orders from a higher power than Rome or Jerusalem. What would a subversive church look like in the modern United States?