Quotes about Reality

Beliefs create reality

Above all else, know that good leaders always define their own reality. No one else can build a discipling culture for you—it must begin in your own life and then overflow into the lives of those you lead. You will not be the perfect example, but you can be a living example.

Jokes? There are no jokes. The truth is the funniest joke of all.

Kingdom citizenship is a spiritual reality, but it is also a mentality. As believers, we already have the Spirit of God, but we need to learn the mind and the heart of God.

It is more comfortable to think about all we might do instead of working to achieve what we can do.

I have argued that the God of the Bible, and especially of the Gospels, can be understood only as God-in-public, and that methods of criticism designed to keep this rumor quiet need to be challenged by appropriate historical, theological, and political critique and replaced by methods that do justice to the reality of the texts and hence do justice - in the much fuller sense - in the public world that the Gospels demand to address.

Love is the deepest mode of knowing, because it is love that, while completely engaging with reality other than itself, affirms and celebrates that other-than-self reality. This is the mode of knowing that is necessary if we are to live in the new public world, the world launched at Easter, the world in which Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn't.

Christians do not avail ourselves of Plato's safety-hatch and say that the real world is not a thing of space, time, and matter, but another world into which we can escape. We say that the present world is the real one, and that it's in bad shape, but expecting to be repaired.

Christian holiness consists not of trying as hard as we can to be good but of learning to live in the new world created by Easter, the new world we publicly entered in our baptism. There are many parts of the world we can't do anything about except pray. But there is one part of the world, one part of physical reality, that we can do something about, and that is the creature each of us call "myself.

In fact, like most things in life that really matter—love, beauty, justice—you can't prove things in history the way you can prove Pythagoras's theorem. But there are lots of things you can be certain of nonetheless.

Ah, we think, God's kingdom is simply the sum total of all the souls who respond in faith to God's love. It isn't a real kingdom in space, time, and matter. It's a spiritual reality, "not of this world." John, though, will not collude with this Platonic shrinkage.

Here is the challenge, I believe, for the Christian artist, in whatever sphere: to tell the story of the new world so that people can taste it and want it, even while acknowledging the reality of the desert in which we presently live.