These beliefs contradict each other, so they can’t be all right
Fear is the absence of faith, while the presence of faith leaves us with the absence of nothing.
A belief in nothing is just as much a belief as a belief in something.
I don't know how but it is happening today.
Do not tell me about your principles, for words are easy to craft and talk is cheap. Rather, let me see you live them out in the sentence and syntax of everyday life. And let me see that not so that I know that you understand the principles that you espouse, for that is easy. Rather, I want to know that you understand the sacrifice of living them out, and that the weight of the principle offsets the sacrifice of carrying it.
When it comes to the Big Questions in Life, the preponderance of credible evidence is the best advisor to inform our beliefs. The companion enterprise are the methods by which one interprets the evidence which demand unwavering intellectual honesty.
I can wish no better thing for you, sirs, than this, that, recognizing in this way that intelligence is given to every man, you may be of the same opinion as ourselves, and believe that Jesus is the Christ of God.
Jesus was born into an existence that I cannot fathom, and He died a death of the very same sort. And therefore, what insanity causes me to presume His inability to understand the difficulties of my existence when His wildly eclipsed mine, and why do I doubt His adequacy to engage the death within me when He died a death for me?
In this imperceptibly vast sea of humanity, we are scarcely a drop. But in the sweeping vastness of such a turbulent sea we forget that these waters are in fact made up of a collection of drops, for without these individual drops the sea would be nothing but parched rumor and dusty myth. And because that’s the case, the turbulence engulfing this enormous body of water can be brought to a stilled calm by this single drop that we are touching the drop that everyone else is with the love that God has touched us with.
I think that the stories that God has told and the things that He has done seem utter implausible to us only because we lock Him into the tiny rubrics that the stories He has told and the things that He has done invite us outside of.
One of the greatest plagues that besets our humanity is our inability to believe in the totality of who we are and the utter vastness of what we can achieve. And because of this crippling disbelief, we settle for the lesser lives that we were never built for. Yet despite the enormity of our skepticism, it is well within our reach to smash such a crippling disbelief for, in fact, that is the very thing that we were built for.
I think that the stories that God has told and the things that He has done seem utterly implausible to us only because we lock Him into the tiny rubrics that the stories He has told and the things that He has done invite us outside of.
When we fall to the bottom of the hole that we’ve spent our lives digging, we will find that God was there waiting for us long before we showed up. And in one hand He’s holding all of the shovels that we used to dig it, and in the other He’s got a ladder.
The greatest sacrifice is to unreservedly give the whole of oneself to another, knowing full well that such a gift must be wholly rejected, blithely tossed aside and trampled underfoot as some worthless filth because (much like ourselves) the depravity of the recipient is such that they can only be saved through the death of the giver. And I don’t know of any human who would do that, but I know a God Who did.
We wonder why God waits to step in after it’s too late. That’s because with God there is no such thing as too late.
I don’ know if we believe that things can’t be done. Rather, I think that we’re too fearful to believe that maybe they can.
If you have but the faith of a mustard seed, you shall move mountains.
We’re either ‘running from’ something or ‘running to’ something. And I think that true freedom is ‘resting in’ something.
With God, the impossible is demoted to the rank of the possible.
I must be reminded that God often seems distant because I’ve made Him smaller than what He is and my struggles bigger than what they are.
