Quotes about Belief

But the first Christians didn't see Jesus this way, as if God were somewhere else and then cooked up some way to solve the sin problem at the last minute by getting involved as Jesus. They believed that Jesus was somehow more, that Jesus had actually been present since before creation and had been a part of the story all along.

So as a Christian, I am free to claim the good, the true, the holy, wherever and whenever I find it. I live with the understanding that truth is bigger than any religion and the world is God's and everything in it.

a person who speaks to this hour's need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth.

A Christian is not someone who expects to spend forever in heaven there. A Christian is someone who anticipates spending forever here, in a new heaven that comes to earth.

We cannot earn what we have always had. What we can do is trust that what God keeps insisting is true about us is actually true.

There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.

There are those, like the church websites quoted at the beginning of this chapter, who put it quite clearly: "We get one life to choose heaven or hell, and once we die, that's it. One or the other, forever." God in the end doesn't get what God wants, it's declared, because some will turn, repent, and believe, and others won't.

for a staggering number of people in our world the for of the Jesus message has been buried under a massive pile of againsts. Somewhere

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.

Doctrine is a wonderful servant and a horrible master.

The writers of the scriptures consistently affirm that we're all part of the same family. What we have in common—regardless of our tribe, language, customs, beliefs, or religion—outweighs our differences. This is why God wants "all people to be saved.

If anybody didn't have a Messiah complex, it was Jesus.