Quotes about Character

I'll let John Baillie answer that. He was a distinguished professor who taught theology at the University of Edinburgh. He said: "What makes a man a Christian is neither his intellectual acceptance of certain ideas, nor his conformity to a certain rule, but his possession of a certain Spirit, and his participation in a certain Life.

There is an old saying: 'Give a dog a bad name and you may as well hang him.' But give him a good name — and see what happens!

The fruit of the Spirit, in contrast, gives a sure sign of transformed character. When our deepest attitudes and dispositions are those of Jesus, it is because we have learned to let the Spirit foster his life in us.

He said, "The main thing that you bring the church is the person that you become, and that's what everybody will see; that's what will get reproduced; that's what people will believe. Arrange your life so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy and confidence in your everyday life with God.

An obsession merely with doing all God commands may be the very thing that rules out being the kind of person that he calls us to be.

But taking love itself—God's kind of love—into the depths of our being through spiritual formation will, by contrast, enable us to act lovingly to an extent that will be surprising even to ourselves, at first.

More than any other single thing, in any case, the practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today, with its increasing tendency to emphasize political and social action as the primary way to serve God. It also accounts for the practical irrelevance of Christian faith to individual character development and overall personal sanity and well-being.

Love is not God, but God is love. It is who he is, his very identity.

Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them.

The intention of God is that we should each become the kind of person whom he can set free in his universe, empowered to do what we want to do. Just as we desire and intend this, so far as possible, for our children and others we love, so God desires and intends it for his children. But character, the inner directedness of the self, must develop to the point where that is possible.

There is a widespread notion that just passing through death transforms human character. Discipleship is not needed. Just believe enough to "make it." But I have never been able to find any basis in scriptural tradition or psychological reality to think this might be so. What if death only forever fixes us as the kind of person we are at death? What would one do in heaven with a debauched character or a hate-filled heart?

And with respect to feelings that are inherently injurious and wrong, their strategy is not one of resisting them in the moment of choice but of living in such a way that they do not have such feelings at all, or at least do not have them in a degree that makes it hard to decide against them when appropriate.