Quotes about People

Whenever God does something new, he involves people — often unlikely people, frequently surprised and alarmed people. He asks them to trust him in a new way, to put aside their natural reactions, to listen humbly for a fresh word and to act on it without knowing exactly how it's going to work out.

especially when you add in his apparent fondness for parties, on the one hand, and prayer, on the other, and his remarkably shrewd ability to sum up situations, people, and problems in a pithy phrase or to tease out fresh meaning with a neat, telling story. What a man, we say to ourselves.

Among the many highly complex and artistic patterns which have been discerned throughout these chapters we may highlight the rather obvious one: that the judgments, like the plagues in Egypt, are the prelude to the rescue of God's people.

More satisfactory by far, at the level of history, is to say with Gerhard Lohfink that Jesus did not intend to found a church because there already was one, namely the people of Israel itself. Jesus' intention was therefore to reform Israel, not to found a different community altogether.

The Creator works in a thousand ways, but one central way is through people—people who think, who pray, who make difficult decisions, who work hard, especially in prayer. That is part of what it means to be image-bearers. The question of divine action and human action is seldom a zero-sum game. If the worlds of heaven and earth have rushed together in Jesus and the spirit, one should expect different layers of explanation to reside together, to reinforce one another.

We can be, and we are called to be, good-news people—people who themselves are being renewed by the good news, people through whom the good news is bringing healing and hope to the world at whatever level.

The second speaker contributing to what we hear the gospels saying is the one that enables us to hear the story of Jesus as the story of Israel's God coming back to his people as he had always promised.

It is that they learn to think of themselves as characters in the story of God and his people, whose earlier chapters set out characteristic lessons to be mastered by those who find themselves in the later chapters. But the overall point is this: they are in the same story, not a different story which happens to be parallel to another earlier one.

Your Name is holy. May Your Name be worshiped and honored by Your people everywhere. May our lives in no way bring disrespect or dishonor to your great Name. And may all peoples of the earth come to revere Your sacred Name.

What freedom am I being offered while the organization of the people remains banned? Only free men can negotiate. A prisoner cannot enter into contracts,

Christianity is one of the few worldviews that can justify absolute human rights because it affirms that those rights are given to us by God. As our founders recognized, governments aren't meant to give or take away rights: governments are meant to secure rights that the people already possess. That's what we affirmed in our Declaration of Independence.

That's what I dislike most of all in people — cold irony. It's a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything. Like an impotent man who can't experience pleasure himself, but will do all he can to ruin it for others