Quotes about God

Prophecy will confirm and broaden the vision; it cannot create one if nothing is there. Vision is created through prayer, seeking God and sharing our hearts with people in the work. If these things are absent we need to be restoring people to God, not creating vision for empty hearts.

There is some prophecy, however, that is unconditional. It depends solely on God himself for fulfillment. Normally it relates to the overview of his plans and purposes for mankind as a whole.

I read a story about an old gentlemen who was known for his godly life. Someone asked him one day, "What do you do when you are tempted, old man?" He replied, "I just look up to Heaven and say, 'Lord, your property is in danger.'

With reckless abandon, therefore, we are to manifest God's unconditional love by ascribing unsurpassable worth to all people at all times in all conditions.

It's my conviction that we are made to perpetually share in a life in which we are perfectly and unconditionally loved, in which we experientially know we could not matter more to God than we already do, and in which we feel absolutely secure in this love and worth, for we know that nothing—including the loss of our biological life—could cause us to lose this life.

When we live as though we were lords of our own life, capable of meeting our own needs, we are living in the flesh. When we treat people, possessions, or achievements as though they were the source of our worth and significance rather than God, we are living in the flesh. In fact, insofar as we live as though God were not present, moment-by-moment, and as though this wasn't the most important aspect of any present moment, we are living in the flesh.

The reason God now calls kingdom people to remain separate from the ways of the kingdom-of-the-world is not to isolate them from their culture but to empower them to authentically serve their culture and ultimately win it over to allegiance to Jesus Christ. The reason we are not to be of the world is so we may be for the world.

Many people have trouble passionately loving and living for God because they have a mental picture of him that inspires anything but passion.

The love demonstrated on Calvary is the center of the gospel, for it reveals the beauty of God himself.

Love must be chosen. It must be free, and it must be from the heart, without external motivations. But, quite frankly, it's very difficult for an all-powerful God to behave in such a way that love can occur with these qualities.

This is what we are called to be: a community characterized by radical, revolutionary, Calvary-quality love; a community that manifests the love of the triune God (John 17:21—26); a community that strives for justice not by conquering but by being willing to suffer; a community that God uses to transform the world by providing it with an alternative to its own self-centered, violent way of existing.

As the New Testament and the church tradition teach, the life of God is nothing other than the perfect love that eternally unites the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and this Triune God spoke creation into being with the ultimate goal of inviting humans to share in this life. This is what God created us to long for!