Quotes about Christ

The power that the world acknowledges comes out of the mouth of a gun; the power that the person of faith respects comes from the mouth of Christ.

I want to develop discernments that say an unapologetic "no" to ways that violate the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn't love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.

The contrast between world and church in this regard is stark: American culture is doing its dead level best with its celebrities, consumerism, and violence to keep us in a perpetually arrested state of adolescence. Yet all the while the church is quietly and without false advertising immersing us in the conditions of becoming mature to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

God reveals himself, that is, in creation and in Christ, in ways we can see and hear and touch and taste, in place and person. Beauty is the term we apply to these hints of transcendence, these perceptions that there is more going on here than we can account for. And that is how we come to identify as apostles of the gospel the men and women and, yes, children, who use words and images and sounds and textures to wake us up to beauty latent and implicit all around us.

I enter a room now not wondering what I am going to do or say, but what the risen Christ has already done, already said. I come in on a story that is in progress, something that is resurrection, already going on. Sometimes I can clarify a word, sharpen a feeling, help recover an essential piece of memory, but always dealing with what the risen Christ has already set in motion, already brought into being.

It was included in the Songs of Ascents to develop just those aspects of life under God and in Christ which my sometime friend Kelly lacked and which we all need.

Treating souls for whom Christ died as numbers or projects or resources seemed to me something like a sin against the Holy Spirit.

The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother's is sure.

We know very well that we are not set right with God by rule-keeping but only through personal faith in Jesus Christ.

It is this fusion of God speaking to us (Scripture) and our speaking to him (prayer) that the Holy Spirit uses to form the life of Christ in us.

We are traveling in the light, toward God who is rich in mercy and strong to save. It is Christ, not culture, that defines our lives. It is the help we experience, not the hazards we risk, that shapes our days.