Quotes about Experience

Every Christian must strive to arrive at beliefs about God that faithfully reflect the realities of his or her life and experience, so that each may know how to live effectively before him in his world. That's theology!

Put his words into practice and find them to be true.

Religion as actually lived, not as some figment of the academic imagination, always claims to involve knowledge of how things are.

This can also be a time of confession, in which you ask for the strength to deal with the failures you experience day by day.

So the kingdom of the heavens, from the practical point of view in which we all must live, is simply our experience of Jesus' continual interaction with us in history and throughout the days, hours, and moments of our earthly existence.

"Knowledge" in biblical language never refers to what we today call "head knowledge," but always to experiential involvement with what is known—to actual engagement with it.

Beyond my immediate context of relationships, the central question my friends and I began asking was quite simple: How could the soul health and transformation available to us become normative in our experience as a church community? While such experience of soul transformation has certainly been normative in seasons throughout history and even today, it is largely absent, or at least rare and idiosyncratic, in many environments where I have served.

It is the experience of having God look you right in the eye and saying, "I love you! I approve of you!" that is the unshakable ground of our self-worth.

When it comes to experiencing the sufficiency of God, we are not talking about what God can do; we are talking about what we need to do. And what we need to do is to turn our minds to God.

I believe one reason why so many people do in fact fail to immerse themselves in the words of the New Testament, and neglect or even avoid them, is that the life they see there is so unlike what they know from their own experience.

The second thing is closely related to it: spokespersons for Christ are those who have knowledge that no one else has. That's why they are the most important people in society. That is because they bring knowledge of what time and eternity are about. They bring knowledge on which people can base their lives. They bring knowledge that can be communicated to others on the basis of experience and reason and Scripture and grace and work and everything else you want to put in the bag.

Anthropologists observe that the world occupied by a human being comprises not only the surrounding land, water, sky, plant and animal life, human beings and works of human hands, but also a "symbolic reality," which is superimposed upon material reality.