Quotes about Belief

If you believe that you're going to leave and evacuate to somewhere else, then why do anything about this world? A proper view of heaven leads not to escape from the world, but to full engagement with it, all with the anticipation of a coming day when things are on earth as they currently are in heaven.

Jesus did not use hell to try and compel "heathens" and "pagans" to believe in God, so they wouldn't burn when they die. He talked about hell to very religious people to warn them about the consequences of straying from their God-given calling and identity to show the world God's love.

This insistence that God will be united and reconciled with all people is a theme the writers and prophets return to again and again. They are very specific in their beliefs about who God is and what God is doing in the world, constantly affirming the simple fact that God does not fail.

First, I'm a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God. I realize that for some people, hearing talk about Jesus shrinks and narrows the discussion about God, but my experience has been the exact opposite. My experiences of Jesus have opened my mind and my heart to a bigger, wider, more expansive and mysterious and loving God who I believe is actually up to something in the world.

What this particular religious system that I was working in did was ever so subtly divide the world up into two spheres Ãƒ¢Ã¢'¬Ã‚¦ the spiritual, and then the rest of life. As if spiritual is a dimension of life that some people have, and some don't. As if spiritual means less real than the stuff of everyday life like money and bodies and kids and houses and jobs. As if spiritual is about another time and another place when you die and leave this place.

Do you believe that God is for you? Do you believe that God's desire is that you flourish, thrive, shine? Do you believe that God wants you to be everything you could possibly be as you become more and more and more your true self?

that matters is how you respond to Jesus. And that answer totally resonates with me; it is about how you respond to Jesus. But it raises another important question: Which Jesus?

So is it not only that a person has to respond, pray, accept, believe, trust, confess, and do—but also that someone else has to act, teach, travel, organize, fund-raise, and build so that the person can know what to respond, pray, accept, believe, trust, confess, and do?

If you don't have that, you will die apart from God and spend eternity in torment in hell. The problem, however, is that the phrase "personal relationship" is found nowhere in the Bible.

So if that's it, if that's the point of it all, if that's the ticket, the center, the one unavoidable reality, the heart of the Christian faith, why is it that no one used the phrase until the last hundred years or so?

First, I'm a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God.

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.