Quotes about Sovereignty

now I saw it was so far from any goodness in me to own myself spiritually dead and destitute of all goodness that, on the contrary, my mouth would be forever stopped by it; and it looked as dreadful to me to see myself and the relation I stood in to God—I a sinner and criminal, and He a great Judge and Sovereign—as it would be to a poor trembling creature to venture off some high precipice.

It's only logical that if God always answered our prayers as we wanted him to, those answers to our prayers could hardly be considered miraculous. They would only be part of a predictable system that we could manipulate, if only we knew how. It really makes God not God, but a "God" or a god whom we are ultimately able to control through our efforts, whether via prayer or via our "moral" actions designed to elicit a favorable response.

That country where they wouldn't be told what to think or how to live or even whether or how to worship.

There was only one reality, and Christ was Lord over all of it, or none.

The core problem seems to lie in the classical-philosophical equation of power with control, and thus omnipotence with omnicontrol, an equation that forces the problem of evil to be seen as a problem of God's sovereignty. If it is accepted that God is all-loving and all-powerful, and if maximum power is defined as maximum control, then by definition there seems to be no place for evil. If goodness controls all things, all things must me good.

There is no single, all-determinative divine will that coercively steers all things, and hence there is here no supposition that evil agents and events have a secret divine motive behind them. Hence too, one need not agonize over what ultimately good, transcendent divine purpose might be served by any particular evil event.

God is light and in him there is no darkness" (1 John 1:5). Indeed, God's "eyes are too pure to behold evil" (Hab. 1:13). How are these verses consistent with the view that everything— including all the evil that people have experienced throughout history—is part of God's sovereign will?

Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God's ways for us. We can have all the hell we want.

Big guns are good but the Almighty is better, and He is on our side, no matter what the Kaiser says about it.

Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people. There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things.

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty... We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. --April 18, 1864 Address at Baltimore

If He wasn't going to use that hard thing for your good, it wouldn't have happened. He had to sign off on every single thing that touches your life.