We are unceasing spiritual beings with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.
One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.
You can live opposite of what you profess, but you cannot live opposite of what you believe.
We are invited to make a pilgrimage – into the heart and life of God.
Great faith, like great strength in general, is revealed by the ease of its workings. Most of what we think we see as the struggle OF faith is really the struggle to act as IF we had faith when in fact we do not.
The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.
There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.
Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.
Theology is a part of our lives. It’s unavoidable. A thoughtless theology guides our lives with just as much force as a thoughtful and informed one.
We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.
The main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish. It’s the person you become.
We Christians should be aware that there’s something at stake in cultural participation that we wouldn’t have been concerned about if all we did was worry about the messages in culture.
Understanding is the basis of care. What you would take care of you must first understand, whether it be a petunia or a nation.
The command is “Do no work.” Just make space. Attend to what is around you. Learn that you don’t have to DO to BE. accept the grace of doing nothing. Stay with it until you stop jerking and squirming.
As Augustine say clearly, God being God offends human pride. If God is running the universe and has first claim on our lives, guess who isn’t running the universe and does not get to have things as they please.
Grace is not opposed to effort; it’s opposed to earning.
Sometimes we get caught up in trying to glorify God by praising what He can do and we lose sight of the practical point of what He actually does do.
Actions are not impostions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities it supervises and interacts with.
The will is transformed by experience, not information.
To withhold our bodies from religion is to exclude religion from our lives.