Quotes about Influence

Caesar's messengers didn't go round the world saying, 'Caesar is lord, so if you feel you need to have a Roman-empire kind of experience, you might want to submit to him'.

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life—for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.

When God does the big things, the little people get drawn in too. Human systems often forget that, but God doesn't.

You become like what you worship.

Paul does not quote the Psalms or Isaiah, but we can see the influence of their double vision of the One God all the way through: the sovereign God, high above and beyond the earth so that its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, yet gently at hand, gathering the lambs in his arms and leading the mother sheep.

Think of Oscar Wilde's wonderful scene in his play Salome, when Herod hears reports that Jesus of Nazareth has been raising the dead. "I do not wish him to do that," says Herod. "I forbid him to do that. I allow no man to raise the dead. This man must be found and told that

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 calls "myself.

The church must, in short, learn from Jesus before Pilate how to speak the truth to power rather than for power or merely against power.

But if Christians don't get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?

Some people, including some who wanted to think of themselves as followers of Jesus, took exactly that line. We can watch the process taking place in the so-called Gnostic gospels (books like the Gospel of Thomas).

In the United States, whoever you vote for, you still get a millionaire.

You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.