Quotes about God

It is the nature of God's Word and the regulation of His will first to destroy what is in us and reduce to nothing whatever we are, and then erect His own structure.

Augustine explains: The flesh needs many things even for this life, and this, too, it seeks from God, because not only spiritual things but also earthly things are to be sought from no one but God.

Let us learn, then, to despise the threats and cruel plans of our enemies and conclude for certain that God in the heavens has decided on quite different things and is already laughing at them but playing with us so that He may prove our faith and hope and discipline us.

For "no one has ascended into heaven but He who descended" (John 3:13), that is, no one arrives at the understanding of divinity but he who has first been humbled and who has come down to an understanding of himself, for there he discovers the understanding of God at the same time.

So if you wish to rejoice in Christ, for His sake you must bear sorrow, confusion, inward and outward vexations. The reason is that you cannot hold to Christ without offending the prince of the world. You cannot hold fast to the God of life without rousing against yourself the author of death.

THIS, therefore, is also essentially necessary and wholesome for Christians to know: That God foreknows nothing by contingency, but that He foresees, purposes, and does all things according to His immutable, eternal, and infallible will.

For it to be called a Sacrament, there first needs to be an outward, tangible sign or created thing by which God deals visibly with us, that we may be sure of it. It is not His will to work with us apart from outward means, solely by secret suggestions or special revelation from heaven. But the outward work and sign does not by itself avail or do anything unless it is joined by His Word, by which the sign is made effective and we are made aware of what God is doing in us by this sign.

Trying to merit grace by preceding works, therefore, is trying to placate God with sins, which is nothing but heaping sins upon sins, making fun of God, and provoking His wrath.

Neither men who try to keep the Law, nor those who do not try to keep it, are justified before God, for they are all spiritually dead.

Moreover, I cannot bear with laws for the interpretation of the word of God, since the word of God, which teaches liberty in all other things, ought not to be bound.

Nothing so provokes God as unbelief, for this means denying God directly and thus committing idolatry.

They testify that nature is not changed but is preserved by God. But the stupid and crazy mob of monks has taught that parents, wives, and the world should be abandoned and that one should withdraw into a monastery. But what is to become of human society or finally of all life? Surely that was not sanctity or worship of God, as they have called it; it was satanic madness.