Quotes about Presence

No amount of money or ideas can replace the value of being physically present, giving time and attention to people or projects.

Prayer was as fundamental an element in the life of Jesus as breathing. He inhaled his Father's presence so he could exhale his Father's will.

We have become human "doings" rather than human "beings.

Christian spirituality combines a sense of the awe and majesty of God with a sense of His intimate presence.

Jesus, to be sure, often spent long times alone in prayer. But he was also deeply at home where there was a party, a kingdom party, a celebration of the fact that God was at last taking charge.

Saying `our father' isn't just the boldness, the sheer cheek, of walking into the presence of the living and almighty God and saying `Hi, Dad.' It is the boldness, the sheer total risk, of saying quietly `Please may I, too, be considered an apprentice son.' It means signing on for the Kingdom of God.

As C. S. Lewis said in a famous lecture, next to the sacrament itself your Christian neighbor is the holiest object ever presented to your sight, because in him or her the living Christ is truly present.3

God's kingdom is coming in and through the work of Jesus, not by taking people away from this world but by transforming things within this world, bringing the sphere of earth into the presence, and under the rule, of heaven itself.

He is himself the Temple, the physical place on earth where the Shekinah has come to take up residence.

it is possible to allow the study of the text, and of different interpretations of the text, to become a substitute for allowing the text to bring us into the presence of the living God.

This was something new. They recognized the Jesus followers as a strange new presence in their midst, neither a "religion" nor a "political power," but a whole new kind of life, a new way of being human.

Because we live between ascension and appearing, joined to Jesus Christ by the Spirit but still awaiting his final coming and presence, we can be both properly humble and properly confident.