Quotes about Belief

If the Bible says something once, notice it but don't count it as a fundamental principle. If it says it twice, think about it twice. If it is repeated many times, then dwell on it and seek to understand it. What you want to believe from the Bible is its message on the whole and use it as a standard for interpreting the peripheral passages.

The advantage of believing in the Trinity is not that we get an A from God for knowing the right answer. The advantage of believing in the Trinity is that we then live as if the Trinity is real, as if the cosmos around us is actually beyond all else a community of unspeakably magnificent personal beings of boundless love, knowledge and power.

God's care for humanity was so great that he sent his unique Son among us, so that those who count on him might not lead a futile and failing existence, but have the undying life of God Himself. JOHN 3:16

And when people sense that something is coming around the logical corner that they will not to be so, they often just refuse to carefully follow the argument. It's as common as sin, and a large part of it too.

There is a widespread notion that just passing through death transforms human character. Discipleship is not needed. Just believe enough to "make it." But I have never been able to find any basis in scriptural tradition or psychological reality to think this might be so. What if death only forever fixes us as the kind of person we are at death? What would one do in heaven with a debauched character or a hate-filled heart?

We are required to "bet our life" that the visible world, while real, is not reality itself.

Often I have asked at USC and other places in public, "Has anyone shown that reality is secular? Could you show me the person and where this was done? If it has not been done, isn't it a little on the questionable side to announce we are a secular university?

For at least several decades the churches of the Western world have not made discipleship a condition of being a Christian. One is not required to be, or to intend to be, a disciple in order to become a Christian, and one may remain a Christian without any signs of progress toward or in discipleship.

Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ.

This present world is a perfectly safe place for us to be." That certainly is what Jesus, and the Bible as a whole, has to say to us. "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever" (Ps 23).

If we are not prepared to use our power of choice to turn our minds to God, then we do not have contact with God.

Pastors now are mistakenly seen, and perhaps even see themselves, as teaching what Christians are supposed to believe (perhaps what we had better believe), not what is known and what can be known through fair inquiry.