Quotes about God

Calvin saw in the words "Do not judge" a tendency to become overly curious about the sins of others (including those closest to us) that needed to be checked and handed over to God—who alone is the Judge.

The top two lines on every prophet's job description look like this: Speak openly and clearly about what God is for. Speak openly and clearly about what God is against. The third and fourth lines look like this: I [God] am with you. Have courage. (But you may have to duck or die.)

But Augustine knew the Bible's main mission: so that we can become people who love God and love others. If our reading of the Bible leads to this, the mission is accomplished. If it isn't …

If God entered Abraham into the covenant by circumcision and demanded Abraham enter his son through circumcision, then it is clear that God thinks the best way to form children into the covenant faith is by way of birthright entrance into the covenant.

We stand with Calvin when it comes to the moral compass: Jesus "means that however difficult, arduous, troublesome or painful God's rule may be, we must make no excuse for that, as the righteousness of God should be worth more to us, than all the other things which are chiefly dear and precious.

It tells us that God gave the Bible a mission: God speaks to us so we will be the kind of people he wants and will live the way he wants us to live.

God gave the Bible not so we can know it but so we can know and love God through it.

I believe that the broad sweep of the way in which prayer works in the Bible — and I'm thinking here of Jonah and the repentance of Nineveh — teaches us that God, in his sovereignty, has established a kind of contingency in the universe, and that God genuinely interacts with humans who pray in such a way that the universe changes as a result of our prayers.

The first principle of spiritual formation is this: A spiritually formed person loves God and others.

James taught me that there is nothing that shows the world what God is like more clearly than when we love our enemies. Despite the reality that throughout the New Testament the cross is not only how God saves us, it is how we witness to that salvation.

Because they love God and others, they are willing to check their passions and will in order to do God's will, to further God's justice, and to express their longing that God act to establish his will and kingdom.

I'm aware that "enemy love" still scandalizes many a fundamentalist and liberal alike. Who wants a Savior who loves the enemies we want to kill? Who wants to witness to the God whose love falls like rain on the just and the unjust alike? Who wants a God who longs to heal those who have hurt us so they hurt no more? Who wants a Christ who comes to us in the pain we want to run from?