Quotes about God

It was not a cramped, compromised, circumspect life, but a life lived in a kind of wild, joyful, full-throated freedom—that was what it was to obey God.

He and his allies declared that every human being was equal in God's sight and made in the image of God, and must therefore be treated with equal dignity.

It was not so much the fear of punishment by which I was affected," he says, "as a sense of my great sinfulness in having so long neglected the unspeakable mercies of my God and Saviour; and such was the effect which this thought produced, that for months I was in a state of the deepest depression, from strong convictions of my guilt.

He's already done that for us. We need only accept his free gift. And if we see the magnitude of that gift, we are moved to do good things. But it is as gratitude for what God has already done in saving us, not as a way of earning our own salvation. Once we receive God's free gift of love in Jesus, we are properly moved to want to love him back and to love our fellow man.

Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people, that those liberties are the gift of God? That they are violated but with his wrath? I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep for ever.

This was evidently the place Wilberforce had come to, a place of such guilt before God, of such misery at his own failings, that nothing short of being publicly pilloried would do. And so now he unburdened himself somewhat by declaring himself to his friends. One can only imagine what, in this overemotional state, he might have written to them, and one can only imagine what they would have thought upon reading his declaration.

Only in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ has death been drawn into God's power, and it must now serve God's own aims. It is not some fatalistic surrender but rather a living faith in Jesus Christ, who died and rose for us, that is able to cope profoundly with death.

But this other side of God's love—the good news, as it were—he seems not to have heard at all. At least not yet.

Bonhoeffer recognized that standard-issue "religion" had made God small, having dominion only over those things we could not explain. That "religious" God was merely the "God of the gaps," the God who concerned himself with our "secret sins" and hidden thoughts. But Bonhoeffer rejected this abbreviated God.

is far too easy for us to base our claims to God on our own Christian religiosity and our church commitment, and in so doing utterly to misunderstand and distort the Christian idea.

Thinking about the deep call of Christ, which was not about winning, but about submission to God, wherever that might lead.

While Hildebrandt, Niemöller, and Jacobi were thinking about how to defeat Müller, Bonhoeffer was thinking about God's highest call, about the call of discipleship and its cost.