Quotes about Life

The Spirit is more than just one of God's gifts among others; the Holy Spirit is the unrestricted presence of God in which our life wakes up, becomes wholly and entirely living, and is endowed with the energies of life.

True Easter faith is the work of the Spirit, for believing in Christ's resurrection doesn't mean affirming a historical fact, and saying `Oh really?' It means being seized by the life-giving Spirit and experiencing `the powers of the world to come' (Heb. 6.5) in our own living and dying.

To discover the 'traces of God' in nature does not indeed save us, but it does mane us wise, as tradition says; for we discover in the memory of nature a wisdom of existence and life which mirrors the wisdom of God, and for human civilization it is wise to co-operate with nature and to become integrated in it, instead of exploiting and hence destroying it in the interests of human domination.

The ordination of women is not a matter of adaptation to changed social conditions. It has to do with new fife from the beginnings of the Christian church: life out of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

We experience what life and death really are when we love, for in love we go out of ourselves, become capable of happiness and at the same time can be hurt.

I'll praise my Maker while I've breath, And when my voice is lost in death, Praise shall employ my noblest powers; My days of praise shall ne'er be past, While life, and thought, and being last, Or immortality endures.

The type of religion which rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases, regardless of their meanings, or shrinks from "controversial" matters, will never stand amid the shocks of life. In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight.

The assertion is often made, indeed, that Jesus kept His own Person out of His gospel, and came forward merely as the supreme prophet of God. That assertion lies at the very root of the modern liberal conception of the life of Christ. But common as it is, it is radically false.

Nevertheless, despite all superficial continuity, a remarkable change has come about within the last seventy-five years. The change is nothing less than the substitution of paganism for Christianity as the dominant view of life. Seventy-five years ago, Western civilization, despite inconsistencies, was still predominantly Christian; today it is predominantly pagan.

It is no wonder, then, that liberalism is totally different from Christianity, for the foundation is different. Christianity is founded upon the Bible. It bases upon the Bible both its thinking and its life. Liberalism on the other hand is founded upon the shifting emotions of sinful men.

It is not enough to know that Jesus is alive; it is not enough to know that a wonderful Person lived in the first century of the Christian era and that Person still lives, somewhere and somehow, today. Jesus lives, and that is well; but what good is it to us?

According to modern liberalism, in other words, Jesus was the Founder of Christianity because He was the first Christian, and Christianity consists in maintenance of the religious life which Jesus instituted.