Quotes about Relationship

To answer your question of why Adam and Eve were given a choice in the first place, they had to be given a choice. God had to create space for them to choose Him.

As God delights in his own beauty, he must necessarily delight in the creature's holiness which is a conformity to and participation of it, as truly as [the] brightness of a jewel, held in the sun's beams, is a participation or derivation of the sun's brightness, though immensely less in degree.

Oh, the closest walk with God is the sweetest heaven that can be enjoyed on earth!

It is of vast consequence how ministers discharge their office, and conduct themselves towards their people in the work of the ministry, and in affairs appertaining to it. 'Tis also a matter of vast importance, how a people receive and entertain a faithful minister of Christ, and what improvement they make of his ministry.

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.

When those that we have formerly been conversant with, are turning to God, and joining themselves to his people, it ought to be our firm resolution, that we will not leave them; but that their people shall be our people, and their God our God. It

He said when you read the Bible, you must think that here and now God is speaking with me... He wasn't as abstract as the Greek teachers and all the others. Rather, from the very beginning, he taught us that we had to read the Bible as it was directed at us, as the word of God directly to us. Not something general, not something generally applicable, but rather with a personal relationship to us.

I fancy it must be this which, when I am with you, prevents me considering you an object of compassion, tho' Prime Minister of England; for now, when I am out of hearing of your foyning…I cannot help representing you to myself as oppressed with cares and troubles.

To be true to God in the deepest way meant having such a relationship with him that one did not live legalistically by "rules" or "principles." One could never separate one's actions from one's relationship to God. It was a more demanding and more mature level of obedience.

God wants more than anything to let us know he is with us. He sees what we are going through and he cares. Furthermore, he is such a big God that he can afford to deal with us on an intimate level, to encourage us and to wink at us and to hold our hands when we need him to do that.

Indeed, when Luther's school-yard chum Hans Reinecke wrote to him of his father's death, Luther wrote, "Seldom if ever have I despised death as much as I do now." He said that it "has plunged me into deep sadness not only because he was my father but also because he loved me very much." Even more, he says, "through him my creator has given me all that I am and have.

But most extraordinary—and evidence to Mrs. Wilberforce of a "Great Change" indeed, though one she certainly welcomed—was a marked absence of that irritability and harsh temper he had sometimes displayed, especially toward her.