Quotes about Trust

The point of the Abraham-and-Isaac story isn't that you should sacrifice your kid but that you can leave behind any notion of a god who demands that you sacrifice your kid.

Strange, how the writer doesn't explain why Abraham leaves other than saying he hears a divine voice. Something intimate and infinite is calling to him, and he listens.

Central to their trust that all would be reconciled was the belief that untold masses of people suffering forever doesn't bring God glory. Restoration brings God glory; eternal torment doesn't. Reconciliation brings God glory; endless anguish doesn't. Renewal and return cause God's greatness to shine through the universe; never-ending punishment doesn't.

Exactly. It's about a particular kind of relationship with a particular kind of God, one who is good and kind and generous. One who can be trusted. One who keeps insisting, Trust me, I got this.

Yes. Abraham is being invited to trust God, to believe that God is good and has his best interests in mind and will be faithful to him even if Abraham makes a mess of things.

Nerves are God's gift to you, reminding you that your life is not passing you by. Make friends with the butterflies.

But maybe all of these questions are missing the point. Let's set aside all of the saying and doing and being and cutting holes in roofs and assume it's more simple than that. As some would say, "Just believe.

And now here's the twist, the mystery, the unexpected truth about admitting that takes us back to the counterintuitive power of gospel: When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.

You embrace your impotence, your powerlessness, your lack of control over the outcomes—you make peace with all that you can't do, with your limits, with all the people you can't help.

If I can with confidence say That still for another day, Or even another year, I will be there for you, my dear, It will be because, though small As measured against the All, I have been so instinctively thorough About my crevice and burrow.

It is now my intention to draw out from the story of Abraham the dialectical consequences inherent in it, expressing them in the form of problemata , in order to see what a tremendous paradox faith is, a paradox which is capable of transforming a murder into a holy act well-pleasing to God, a paradox which gives Isaac back to Abraham, which no thought can master, because faith begins precisely there where thinking leaves off.

If this had not been the case with Abraham, then perhaps he might have loved God but not believed; for he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself, he who loves God believingly reflects upon God.