christian Quotes

“To use good things to our own ends is always a false religion”

“Discipline brings freedom.”

“Spiritual disciplines can do nothing. They can only get us to the place where something can be done.”

“We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. ‘We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.’ ...It is time to awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick.”

“To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.”

“Humility, as we all know, is one of those virtues that is never gained by seeking it. The more we pursue it the more distant it becomes. To think we have it is sure evidence that we don’t.”

“reject anything that is producing an addiction in you.”

“If worship does not propel us into greater obedience, it has not been worship. To stand before the Holy One of eternity is to change.”

“The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”

“The mind will always take on an order conforming to that upon which it concentrates.”

“Where are the people today who will respond to the call of Christ? Have we become so accustomed to “cheap grace” that we instinctively shy away from more demanding calls to obedience? “Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross.”4 Why has the giving of money, for example, been unquestionably recognized as an element in Christian devotion and fasting so disputed? Certainly we have as much, if not more, evidence from the Bible for fasting as we have for giving. Perhaps in our affluent society fasting involves a far larger sacrifice than the giving of money.”

“We who have turned our lives over to Christ need to know how very much he longs to eat with us, to commune with us. He desires a perpetual Eucharistic feast in the inner sanctuary of the heart.”

“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”

“Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross. Golgotha came as a result of God’s great desire to forgive, not his reluctance. Jesus knew that by his vicarious suffering he could actually absorb all the evil of humanity and so heal it, forgive it, redeem it.”

“Stop trying to impress people with your clothes and impress them with your life.”

“A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain...This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines - they are a way of sowing to the Spirit... By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done.”

″...I have a better friend, even than Father, to comfort and sustain me. My child, the troubles and temptations of your life are beginning and may be many, but you can overcome and outlive them all if you learn to feel the strength and tenderness of your Heavenly Father as you do that of your earthly one. The more you love and trust Him, the nearer you will feel to Him, and the less you will depend on human power and wisdom. His love and care never tire or change, can never be taken from you, but may become the source of lifelong peace, happiness, and strength. Believe this heartily, and go to God with all your little cares, and hopes, and sins, and sorrows, as freely and confidingly as you come to your mother.”

“True service is a lifestyle. It acts from the ingrained patterns of living. It springs spontaneously to meet human need.”

“Freedom in the Gospel does not mean license. It means opportunity.”

“Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification.”

“We are not trying to manipulate God and tell Him what to do. Rather, we are asking Him to tell us what to do.”

“Of all spiritual disciplines prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with the Father.”

“Christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another, except that the more bitter our enemy’s hatred, the greater his need of love. Be his enmity political or religious, he has nothing to expect from a follower of Jesus but unqualified love. In such love there is no inner discord between private person and official capacity. In both we are disciples of Christ, or we are not Christians at all.”

“If you believe, take the first step, it leads to Jesus Christ. If you don’t believe, take the first step all the same, for you are bidden to take it.”

“The will of God, to which the law gives expression, is that men should defeat their enemies by loving them.”

“It is only because he became like us that we can become like him.”

“Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”

“To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us. Once more, all that self-denial can say is: ‘He leads the way, keep close to him.’”

“A man may have knowledge like an angel and yet not be Christian. So your sign of knowledge as evidence is not valid. Indeed, to know is a thing that pleases talkers and boasters, but to do is what pleases God.”

“I wasn’t allowed to do anything except the Lord’s work on a Sunday, but as I wasn’t a born again Christian, any of the Lord’s work I might do, like reading the Shangaan bible to Dee and Sun, wasn’t creating any bricks for my mansion in the sky.”

“You know, I think He honestly does care about how we play on the field, more than anything more than win or lose our hearts on the field.”

“On the field I’m trying to play for the glory of God but then also I’m trying to give everything I have and win and compete. And so I think more than just winning or losing, I think He cares about where our hearts are when we’re playing.”

“I’m not perfect. I’m never going to be. And that’s the great thing about living the Christian life and trying to live by faith, is you’re trying to get better every day. You’re trying to improve.”

“So much of how we act and what we do is based on humility or pride - that’s everything. And when you can humble yourself, you know, we are more like Christ when we can humble ourselves.”

“People have to realize that just because you’re a Christian, it doesn’t mean that you’re perfect, because every once in a while everyone stumbles.”

“But - but the greatest way to witness is by walking that straight and narrow and also realizing that you’re going to mess up. That’s what grace is for. We’re going to fall, but we’ve got to get back up. And you’ve got to improve. And that’s what I’m all about.”

“I pray to start my day and finish it in prayer.”

“It’s OK to be outspoken about your faith.”

“I will continue to work as hard as I can to make this organization proud. Every time I step on the field I will give everything I have and I will leave everything I have on the field every single Sunday.”

“When I went into their family, it was the abode of happiness and contentment. The mistress of the house was a model of affection and tenderness. Her fervent piety and watchful uprightness made it impossible to see her without thinking and feeling—“that woman is a Christian.”

“Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
 your heart must forget about shame
 and dignity. You are God’s lover,
 yet you worry what people are saying.”

“I learned to rest in the knowledge that I will still be okay even if both of those things go away tomorrow. I studied the gospel and finally grasped the divine knowledge that I was loved and worthy and enough...as I am.”

“When you assume you’re in total control, you don’t stop and take time to seek out a relationship with God; you use alternative means to try and manufacture some peace.”

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploi.... But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”

“If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened?”

“Everyone was so kind. Strong, too. In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life.”

“I heard him ask me, ‘Do you have faith in my plan or not?’ That is what it boils down to: faith. The belief that your life will unfold as it was meant to, even when it unfolds into something painful and difficult to navigate. Do you believe he has a plan?”

“The definition of worship is ‘the feeling of expression or reverence for a deity.’ Creating is the greatest expression of reverence I can think of because I can recognize that the desire to make something is a gift from God.

“Look for the fruits of the Spirit. ...The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, patience, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. ...Choose one that resonates with you at this moment, write it down on some Post-its, and stick it everywhere.”

“Maybe some people need to believe in a proper and omnipotent God to pray, but I don’t.”

“How should a Christian act when evil was in power?”

“So what if—just dreaming out loud, here—Christians were known as the people you couldn’t offend?”

“Isn’t being offended part of being a Christian?”

“Those who put themselves in His hands will become perfect, as He is perfect- perfect in love, wisdom, joy, beauty, health, and immortality. The change will not be completed in this life, for death is an important part of the treatment. How far the change will have gone before death in any particular Christian is uncertain.”

“There are Christians and then there are Christians.”

“We Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.”

“Over the years I have found that one of the greatest struggles in the Christian life is the effort to make adequate time for daily waiting on God, weekly inventory and monthly planning. Yet this is the path to escaping the tyranny of the urgent. ”

“The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians - when they are sombre and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths.”

“It is not possible to be incidentally a Christian. The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing. This suggests a reason for the dislike of Christians by nominal or non-Christians: their lives contain no overwhelming first but many balances.”

“Any Christian who blindly accepts the opinions of the majority and in fear and timidity follows a path of expediency and social approval is a mental and spiritual slave.”

“I have no desire to make them Christian, but I do want to join them in their transformation into sons and daughter of my Papa, into my brothers and sisters, into my Beloved.”

“Christians are like manure: spread them out and they help everything grow better, but keep them in one big pile and they stink horribly.”

“It’s a gift to joyfully recognize and accept our own smallness and ordinariness. Then you are free with nothing to live up to, nothing to prove, and nothing to protect. Such freedom is my best description of Christian maturity, because once you know that your “I” is great and one with God, you can ironically be quite content with a small and ordinary “I.” No grandstanding is necessary. Any question of your own importance or dignity has already been resolved once and for all and forever.”

“He wants all or nothing. The thought of a person calling himself a ‘Christian’ without being a devoted follower of Christ is absurd.”

“Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of “Christian” countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I’m afraid.”

“Lukewarm living and claiming Christ’s name simultaneously is utterly disgusting to God.”

″ It is curious -- the way the human mind works. The Christian begins with this straight proposition, this definite proposition, this inflexible and uncompromising proposition: God is allknowing, and all-powerful.”

″‘The thing I like,’ said Hazel, ‘is they all speak English and they’re all Christians. That makes things so much easier.‘”

“Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence. It is not what we have to acquire to experience life in Christ; it is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience.”

″ One of the most interesting and remarkable things Christians learn is that laughter does not exclude weeping. Christian joy is not an escape from sorrow. Pain and hardship still come, but they are unable to drive out the happiness of the redeemed.”

″ A Christian with a defective memory has to start everything from scratch and spends far too much of his or her time backtracking, repairing, and starting over.”

“A Christian with a good memory avoids repeating old sins, knows the easiest way through complex situations, and instead of starting over each day continues what was begun in Adam.”

“When an ancient temptation or trial becomes a feature in the culture, a way of life that is expected and encouraged, Christians have a stumbling block put before them that is hard to recognize for what it is, for it has been made into a monument, gilded with bronze and bathed in decorative lights.”

“Scripture knows nothing of a solitary Christian. People of faith are always members of a community.”

“Hatred has engulfed the politics of the Left. Socialists hate the financially successful. LGBT activists hate fundamentalist Christians. Black Lives Matter hate police officers. Fat people hate skinny people, like me and Ann Coulter. But none of these groups hate with the PMS-fueled pettiness of feminism.”

“The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex.”

“Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough.”

“And yet remarkable solutions to seemingly impossible problems often occur in these moments of clarity. It’s what gurus call higher consciousness. Biologists call it altered states. Psychologists call it super-sentience. And Christians call it answered prayer. Sometimes, divine revelation simply means adjusting your brain to hear what your heart already knows.”

“Whenever I began to question whether God exists, I looked up to the sky and surely there, right there, between the sun and moon, stands my grandmother, singing a long meter hymn, a song somewhere between a moan and a lullaby and I know faith is the evidence of things unseen. And all I have to do is continue trying to be a Christian.”

“If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

“There are only two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘All right, then, have it your way.‘”

“When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.”

“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”

“God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”

“You may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.”

“There is no great and no small To the Soul that maketh all: And where it cometh, all things are And it cometh everywhere.”

“Genius is religious.”

“My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”

“I also learned that I am a child of God--and that trumps everything else.”

“Jesus was the ultimate embracer of chaos.”

“The God who made the moon and the stars and the mountains and the oceans, The Creator who did all of those things, believed that you and your baby were meant to be a pair. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be a perfect fit. That doesn’t mean you won’t make mistakes. It does mean that you need not fear failure because you can’t fail at a job you were created to do.”

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.

“Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being ‘disturbers of the peace’ and ‘outside agitators.’ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were ‘a colony of heaven,’ called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be ‘astronomically intimidated.’ By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.”

“When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some “disinterested”, because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. you asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the “lord of terrible aspect”, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes”

“There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be “one with”, the Something which is at once the awful haunter of nature and the giver of the moral law. The claim is so shocking—a paradox, and even a horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking too lightly—that only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was; and is; precisely what He said. There is no middle way. If the records make the first hypothesis unacceptable, you must submit to the second. ”

“The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex.”

“The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.”

“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

“Usury was a sin, according to Christian teachings. Apparently, though, while lending money was sinful, borrowing was not, so many of these same Christians availed themselves of the Jewish money-lenders’ services, with the result that they were deeply in debt to them.”

″ ‘Those boys looked mean, like they’d start a fire or something like that. That’s why I hollered at them like I did.’ ‘I see. Ima Dean, can you hear me or have your ears gone bad on you again?’ ‘No’m, I can hear you. You’re mad at me, aren’t you?’ ‘Why, no. Why should I be? It’s all right to holler at strangers. I always do. If they run up to you and stick a knife in your ribs, well, what does that matter? We’re Christians. We know this is not the only life.’ ”

″ ‘What is he sent to school for? Well, partly because he wanted so to go. If he’ll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian, that’s all I want.’ ”

“It may be the case that 1. Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload, which leads to 2. God becoming more marginalized in Christians’ lives, which leads to 3. a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to 4. Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live, which leads to 5. more conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload.”

“love the Lord. I am a Christian. But I’m definitely not religious. I see how religion, particularly as an institution, has caused all kinds of separation between people who need each other.”

“Grandfather looked at us. Then he said, ‘We are Christians. Bear in mind that the Jews crucified our Lord.’ Here Father interjected, ‘But not the Schneiders!‘”

“I’m a Christian first, and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don’t you ever forget it. You know who else was kind of “divisive” in terms of challenging the status quo and the powers-that-be of his day? Jesus Christ.”

“Christian Leaders: You were trained for a world that is disappearing.”

“And here the first word that I wish to say to you: joy! Do not be men and women of sadness: a Christian can never be sad! Never give way to discouragement! Ours is not a joy born of having many possessions, but of having encountered a Person: Jesus, in our midst.”

“I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D’Alembert, D’Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.

″‘I forgive you, Sir Knight,’ said Rowena, ‘as a Christian.’ ‘That means,’ said Wamba, ‘that she does not forgive him at all.‘”