Quotes about God

It is important that we never separate our love for God from our love for others. For loving our neighbors as ourselves is one central way we love God.

Differences between "magic" and biblical faith is that magic is about engaging in behaviors that ultimately benefit the practitioner, while biblical faith is about cultivating a covenantal relationship with God that is built on mutual trust.

To a large degree we have preached our own version of the knowledge of good and evil as though it were the message of salvation. We need to confess that we have sinned in the gravest fashion by frequently loving our version of truth and ethics more than people, and even God himself. For one cannot genuinely love God while refusing to love one's neighbor (1 John 4:20).

Jesus came into this world and died on the cross to blow apart all the deceptive mental pictures of God that we've been enslaved to since the original fall and that lie at the root of all idolatry and sin.

God doesn't depend primarily on the words of his disciples, nor on their clever apologetic arguments, nor on their ability to concoct ingenious marketing techniques. God relies on his disciples participating in the love that he is and thus replicating it toward each other within the body and toward all others outside the body.

Any suggestion that God has returned to his Old Testament theocratic mode of operation—as in raising up America as a uniquely favored nation—is not only unwarranted, it is a direct assault on the distinct holiness of Jesus Christ and the kingdom he died to establish.

What the fear of hell could not do, my discovery of the love of God could do: it began to permanently break the stronghold

We are to derive worth from God alone and to love without judgment and without conditions on the basis of the unsurpassable fullness of life we get from God. Our only job is to love, not judge.

If we further consider this divine panoramic view within which all evil is supposedly a secret good is held by a God who, according to Scripture, has a passionate hatred toward all evil, the solution becomes more problematic still. For it is certainly not clear how God could hate what he himself wills and sees as a contributing ingredient in the good of the whole. If all things play themselves out according to a divine plan, how can God genuinely hate anything?

In a creation populated with free agents, God doesn't always get what he wants. Augustine and the church tradition that followed him were simply mistaken when they insisted that the will of the omnipotent is always undefeated. Because God desires a creation in which love is a reality, he allows his will to be defeated to some extent.

If God does not know with certainty all that will come to pass, as Open Theism argues, believers cannot have the assurance that God has a purpose for every event of their life. Tragedies may occur that God did not specifically ordain or allow, for he did not even know for certain that they would come about. Against such a notion, Scripture encourages believers to look for the hand of God in the midst of their hardships (Exod. 4:11; Heb. 12:3—13). 2.

God acts toward his people, as much as possible, but since he is a God of persuasion rather than coercion, God also allows his people to act on him and to thereby condition the form his self-revelation takes, as much as this is necessary to remain in solidarity with, and to continue to work through, his fallen and culturally conditioned people.