Quotes about Reality

They [Old Testament] taught me about Life with God: not how it is supposed to work, but how it actually does work.

There is only one way for any of us to resolve the tension between the high ideals of the gospel and the grim reality of ourselves: to accept that we will never measure up, but that we do not have to. We are judged by the righteousness of the Christ who lives within, not our own.

If I take Easter as the starting point, the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those whom he loves, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality.

Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God's point of view.

Jeremiah affected me more than any other book. The image of a wounded lover in Jeremiah is an awesome one that I cannot comprehend. Why would the God who created all that exists willingly become subject to such humiliation from creation? I was haunted by the reality of a God who lets our response matter that much.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you," he said.

we should live in such a way that our lives wouldn't make much sense if the gospel were not true.

It is not the same as optimism or wishful thinking, for these imply a denial of reality.

Realistic hope permits a dying person to confront reality, but at the same time gives strength to go on living.

God formed an alliance based on the world as it is, full of flaws, whereas prayer calls God to account for the world as it should be.

So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness.

In the end, only the truth will survive.