Quotes about Experience

We must go out into a desert of some kind (your backyard will do) and come into a personal experience of the awesome love of God.

There is an essential connection between experiencing God, loving God, and trusting God. You will trust God only as much as you love him. And you will love him to the extent you have touched him, rather that he has touched you.

Our response to Jesus Christ will be total the day we experience how total is his love for us. Instead of our self-conscious efforts to be good, we should allow ourselves the luxury of letting ourselves be loved by God. And much of his love for us will be expressed through the medium of our friends' love for us. How else could he reveal it in a way that is tangible? "You are my friends if you do what I command. . . . This is my command: Love each other" (John 15:14, 17).

Biblically, tenderness is what follows when someone reveals to you your own inner beauty, when you discover your belovedness, when you experience that you are deeply and sincerely liked by someone.

I am convinced that without a gutlevel experience of our profound spiritual emptiness, it is not possible to encounter the living God.

I believe that Christianity happens when men and women experience the reckless, raging confidence that comes from knowing the God of Jesus Christ.

Without the sharing of personal experience, prophetic preaching is impossible.

Perhaps the gut issue is not how much theology we have studied or how much Scripture we have memorized. All that really matters is this: Have you experienced the furious longing of God or not?

Christianity is not simply a message but an experience of faith that becomes a message, explicitly offering hope, freedom from bondage, and a new realm of possibility.

Resentment and gratitude cannot coexist, since resentment blocks the perception and experience of life as a gift. My resentment tells me that I don't receive what I deserve. It always manifests itself in envy.

Two people can be part of the same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently from the other. One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it. What makes us human is precisely this freedom of choice.

Poverty, pain, struggle, anguish, agony, and even inner darkness may continue to be part of our experience. They may even be God's way of purifying us. But life is no longer boring, resentful, depressing, or lonely because we have come to know that everything that happens is part of our way to the Father.