Quotes about God

A mind that is unfocused is vulnerable to "the world, the flesh, and the devil," all of which exert a downward pull on your thoughts. As your thinking processes deteriorate, you become increasingly confused and directionless. The best remedy is to refocus your mind and heart on Me, your constant Companion.

God did not give the Bible so we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it. The moment we think we've mastered it, we have failed to be readers of the Bible.

First we are to seek peace in our local fellowship, to end strife and to seek reconciliation with God and with one another, and out of this peace-shaped, kingdom-shaped church we spill over peace into the world.

What we are looking for in reading the Bible is the ability to turn the two-dimensional words on paper into a three-dimensional encounter with God, so that the text takes on life and meaning and depth and perspective and gives us direction for what to do today.

God's dream is the kingdom, that's already clear. But what is not always clear is that God's kingdom happens when human beings are empowered by God's Spirit to do God's kingdom work in the shape of a new community.

We can begin to focus on the eternal if we live to love God and others (the Jesus Creed), if we pursue justice as the way we are called to love others as God's creations, if we live out a life that drives for peace as how loving people treat one another, and if we strive for wisdom instead of just knowledge or bounty.

God did not give the Bible so we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it.

The reality is that each of our churches has created a Christian culture and Christian life for likes and sames and similiarities and identicals. Instead of powering God's grand social experiment, we've cut up God's plan into segregated groups, with the incredibly aggravating and God-dishonoring result that most of us are invisible to one another.

If you want to know how Jesus understands the Christian life, the place to begin is with what he means by kingdom of God.

But humans want to usurp the place of God, making themselves the center of the Story.

He's staring into the face of fellow Israelites who don't know the grace of enemy love and who want to appeal too quickly to the lex talionis or who want to become judges like God (7:1—5; cf. Jas 4:11—12). Moreover, that same audience needed to hear that forgiveness is the way kingdom living works. Those who genuinely love others forgive. Those who don't are not kingdom people.

We say we believe in God, trust in God, and are sustained by God; but in our actions we do everything for ourselves, trusting in ourselves and anxious about the providence of God, which unravels our theism.