Quotes about Absence

“We found the jail securely locked, with the guards posted at the doors; but when we opened them, we found no one inside.”

Although I am absent from you in body, I am present with you in spirit, and I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did this, just as if I were present.

I already warned you the second time I was with you. So now in my absence I warn those who sinned earlier and everyone else: If I return, I will not spare anyone,

For although I am absent from you in body, I am present with you in spirit, and I delight to see your orderly condition and firm faith in Christ.

What we call pleasure, and rightly so is the absence of all pain.

I am often criticized, or at least questions are raised, about what appears to be the absence of the Holy Spirit in my work.

Doesn't certainty about a universal negative require omniscience? Don't you have to have knowledge of everywhere to know that there is no X anywhere?

Faith is the acknowledgment of the entire absence of all goodness in us, and the recognition of the cross as the substitute for all the want on our part. Faith saves, because it owns the complete salvation of another, and not because it contributes anything to that salvation.

Every time you mourn for me, I'll be far away. But when you celebrate, I'll be right there with you, dancing.

And yet when I wish to explore how faith works, I usually sneak in by the back door of doubt, for I best learn about my own need for faith during its absence. God's invisibility guarantees I will experience times of doubt. Everyone dangles on a pendulum that swings from belief to unbelief, back to belief, and ends - where?

As Dennis Covington has written, Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend. 7-20

My feelings of God's presence — or God's absence — are not the presence or the absence.