Quotes about Belief

So watch your step, friends. Make sure there's no evil unbelief lying around that will trip you up and throw you off course, diverting you from the living God.

JOHN 3:16-18 [Jesus said,] "This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn't go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again.

I had escaped the snare of certitude that I welcomed so avidly at first and entered, via the name of Jesus, the wide and comprehensive company of Jesus.

The person of faith is not a person who has been born, luckily, with a good digestion and sunny disposition. The assumption by outsiders that Christians are naive or protected is the opposite of the truth: Christians know more about the deep struggles of life than others, more about the ugliness of sin.

No literature is more realistic and honest in facing the harsh facts of life than the Bible. At no time is there the faintest suggestion that the life of faith exempts us from difficulties.

Theologian Karl Rahner was once asked if he believed in miracles. His reply? 'I live on miracles—I couldn't make it through a day without them.' Still another name for it is mystery.

But we can't believe that he condescends to watch the soap opera of our daily trials and tribulations; so we purchase our own remedies for that.

The way we think of and respond to God is the most practical thing we do. In matters of everyday practicality, nothing, absolutely nothing, takes precedence over God.

Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God's righteousness and less and less attention to our own; finding the meaning of our lives not by probing our moods and motives and morals but by believing in God's will and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not charting the rise and fall of our enthusiasms. It is out of such a reality that we acquire perseverance.

Life in this world is often difficult, but living with God's constant presence and an eternal hope allows us to experience joy no matter what we may face. God's presence in our lives is always a reason for joy.

From an outsider it must have looked much of the time as if the wicked fist dominated the Israelites' lives. From the inside the witness of faith said that it did not:

There is no model conversion. There is no prescribed ritual, whether emotional or liturgical. We are all different. God is the same and has the same salvation to work in us, but he creates an original story every time.