Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The hope that God has provided for you is not merely a wish. Neither is it dependent on other people, possessions, or circumstances for its validity. Instead, biblical hope is an application of your faith that supplies a confident expectation in God's fulfillment of His promises. Coupled with faith and love, hope is part of the abiding characteristics in a believer's life.
It's important for people in the Church to realize that the way they talk and think about the Bible isn't the way Bible scholars talk and think about it - and I'm including "Bible-believing" scholars there. There is a wide gap between the work of biblical scholars, whose business it is to read the text of the Bible in its own worldview context, and what you hear in church.
As I get considerably beyond the biblical allotment of three score years and ten, I feel with increasing intensity that I can express my gratitude for still being around on the oxygen-side of the earth's crust only by not standing pat on what I have hitherto known and loved. While oxygen lasts, there are still new things to love, especially if compassion is a form of love.
I have never been able to conjure up (as some great Evangelical missionaries have) the appalling vision of the millions who are not only perishing but will inevitably perish. On the other hand... I am not and cannot be a universalist. Between these extremes I cherish and hope the majority of the human race will be be saved. And I have a solid biblical basis for this belief.
It's such a biblical posture in worship that speaks of reverence. If you look through the Bible, there's a whole host of people who faced up to the glory of God and found themselves facedown in worship. So the album weaves through a theme of reverence, wonder, and mystery in worship, things I feel we really need to grasp more of in our worship expressions. I know that I do!
Our faith is what inspires us to reach out and volunteer to help others. As a child my parents taught me the biblical charge, "To whom much is given, much is expected," and faith guides me that way. And I believe, especially in this day and age, it's vital that we provide our children with a foundation from which to build their lives - one that gives them a sense of purpose.
It says in this world you will have trouble in John 16:33 but take heart you can have peace in me because I've overcome the world. I think for believers you know we are helping people pursue holiness through a relationship with Christ, through biblical community in their local church, through honesty and transparency, sharing what it is that troubles them, being accountable.
The Bible in itself is not the Word of God. The Word of God is a person. Neither does the Bible have life, power or light in itself any more than did the Jewish Torach. These attributes may be ascribed to the Bible only by virtue of its relationship to Him who is Word, Life, Power and Light. Life is not in the book, as the Pharisees supposed, but only in the Man of the book .
The process of biblical change, explained in God's Word, begins when you repent of your sin and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. God has given you everything you need to make the changes in your life that will please Him and will lead to His blessings. As you continue to obey God's Word, biblical change toward maturity will occur in your life until you see Jesus face to face.
Many biblical passages teach that we're not saved by our own efforts but by the grace of God alone. But the same passages also tell us good works are an essential evidence of the salvation experience. We're not saved by good works, but for good works. It begins with God's grace, and it's sustained by his grace as you shape your character by what you do as you cross the bridge.
In HEATHEN, R. Flowers Rivera remixes the classical and the Biblical, the usual and the typical until what we thought we knew of ourselves and others is new again. The mythic becomes particular; the particular becomes mythic in these fascinating poems of personalities and personas. Rivera’s work is rich in empathy and invention. Heathen is a book of psalms for the present day.
We like to pretend the core ideas of the faith are more palatable or workable within our modern rationalistic approach to Scripture than the stuff we want to call "too weird" because of our own intellectual sensibilities. The truth is they are not. So we come up with interpretations to eliminate the weirdness of the biblical worldview that makes us uncomfortable. Problem solved!
Theology is a non-subject. I'm not saying that professors of theology are non-professors. They do interesting things, like study biblical history, biblical literature. But theology, the study of gods, the study of what gods do, presupposes that gods exist. The only kind of theology that I take account of are those theological arguments that actually argue for the existence of God.
The Bible portrays God as entering into covenants with people which, when broken, causes him grief and sorrow. The biblical prophet Hosea and God's using him as an illustration of how much Israel's idolatry costs God emotionally points to God's vulnerability. But also the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ who, even as God the Son, suffered for our sins, points to God's vulnerability.
The Louvre! The Louvre has me in its clutches. Every time I'm there rich blessings rain down upon me. I am coming to understand Titian more and more and learning to love him. And then there is Botticelli's sweet Madonna, with red roses behind her, standing against a blue-green sky. And Fiesole with his poignant little biblical stories, so simply told, often so glorious in their colors.
Don't cohabitate. Don't fornicate. Don't look at pornography. Don't create a standard of beauty. Have your spouse be your standard of beauty. This is one of the great devastating effects of pornography: you lust after people and compare your spouse to them. It's impossible to be satisfied in your marriage if you don't have a standard that is biblical; that standard is always your spouse.
Eventually, I think, by using such elements as flocks of birds or biblical quotes, repeatedly I add meaning to my final product. I'm still exploring how to express my feelings through these elements. I've always felt that in order to portray humans, you should not be shooting humans; you should be shooting something else. And what I've used is animals, which are very important in my films.
Dave Stark has taken the best of recent marketplace management concepts and married them to timeless biblical principles of leadership, translating business jargon into ministry language. The combination is an encouraging and practical guide to Christ-centered ministry leadership. This book will be helpful to anyone involved in leading a church or serious about modeling servant leadership.
But that is not because these principles are traditional; it is because they are biblical. There is certainly an arrogant, hide-bound type of traditionalism, unthinking and uncritical, which is carnal and devilish. But there is also a respectful willingness to take help from the Church's past in order to understand the Bible in the present; and such traditionalism is spiritual and Christian.
There's nothing easy or simple or even entertaining (in our contemporary American sense of that word) in disciplining our minds to "see" reality through biblical lenses; it takes effort and time. But Christians who don't take that effort and time will inevitably succumb to some of the anti-biblical and anti-Christian messages that bombard us every day through advertising, entertainment, etc.
If you are a member of a small group or class, I urge you to make a group covenant that includes the nine characteristics of biblical fellowship: We will share our true feelings (authenticity), forgive each other (mercy), speak the truth in love (honesty), admit our weaknesses (humility), respect our differences (courtesy), not gossip (confidentiality), and make group a priority (frequency).
There is no such thing as biblical dating. If you're dating, I don't care who you're dating, you're out of God's will. If you're a young man and you're dating, you're out of God's will. Period. You can come talk to me about it later, you can be mad if you want. But that's just the truth. There's no such thing as recreational dating. There is biblical courtship, there is no recreational dating.
It is not his business to argue men into faith, for that cannot be done; but it is his business to demonstrate the intellectual adequacy of the biblical faith and the comparative inadequacy of its rivals, and to show the invalidity of the criticisms that are brought against it. This he seeks to do, not from any motive of intellectual self-justification, but for the glory of God and His gospel.
I think this is irresponsible preaching and very dangerous, and especially when it is slanted toward children, I think it's totally irresponsible, because I see nothing biblical that points up to our being in the last days, and I just think it's an outrageous thing to do, and a lot of people are making a living—they've been making a living for 2,000 years—preaching that we're in the last days.
Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, Elie Wiesel is also the author of more than 40 books. As relevant as anything to today's discussion are the insights into the Biblical texts that are contained in his lectures and books. They include Messengers of God [1976], Five Biblical Portraits [1978] and his just-published Wise Men and Their Tales - Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic and Hasidic Masters.
Perhaps what is really being proposed by the Evangelical fundamentalists is a return not to the 1950s family but to the family of biblical days. The Old Testament is clear that this was a strong patriarchal family. Men were permitted several wives and concubines. Children were legitimately conceived by these concubines outside of marriage. . . . Is this the Evangelical's idea of an ideal family?
...we see God working in terms of Jewish culture to reach Jews, yet, refusing to impose Jewish customs on Gentiles. Instead non-Jews are to come to God and relate to Him in terms of their own cultural vehicles. We see the Bible endorsing, then, a doctrine we call biblical sociocultural adequacy in which each culture is taken seriously but none advocated exclusively as the only one acceptable to God.
The biblical assertion that women are created in God's image and Boaz's advocacy for Ruth and Naomi necessarily mean women, then and now, have inherent God-given rights. This surely means the church should be at the forefront of advocating for women's rights - not merely political and legal rights, but as in the case of Boaz moving beyond the letter of the law to exceed how any culture regards women.
To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman effort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall--that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary.
One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.
The truth is that we don't know much about the spiritual world except for what Scripture tells us, so it's unwise to think we can speak with clarity about what a divine being can or cannot do. The tools of analyzing the natural world are of no use for analyzing the supernatural world. For the latter we need rules of logic, and the supernatural beliefs of the biblical writers are quite defensible in that arena.
Systematic theology will ask questions like "What are the attributes of God? What is sin? What does the cross achieve?" Biblical theology tends to ask questions such as "What is the theology of the prophecy of Isaiah? What do we learn from John's Gospel? How does the theme of the temple work itself out across the entire Bible?" Both approaches are legitimate; both are important. They are mutually complementary.
Well, it [evolution] is a theory, it is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was believed. But if it was going to be taught in the schools, then I think that also the biblical theory of creation, which is not a theory but the biblical story of creation, should also be taught.
[John Calvin's] treatment of the person and work of Christ, of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer, of prayer and liturgy, of the sacraments, and of the way in which we have an in-built sense of the divine that we suppress to our great sorrow - these are all immense contributions to Christian thought. The same could be said of his commentaries, which are still regularly consulted by biblical critics today.
But I should be very sorry if an interpretation founded on a most conjectural scientific hypothesis were to get fastened to the text in Genesis... The rate of change of scientific hypothesis is naturally much more rapid than that of Biblical interpretations, so that if an interpretation is founded on such an hypothesis, it may help to keep the hypothesis above ground long after it ought to be buried and forgotten.
According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.
[The canonization of the Koran involved the] attribution of several, partially overlapping, collections of logia [sayings] (exhibiting a distinctly Mosaic imprint) to the image of a Biblical prophet (modified by the material of the Muhammadan evangelium into an Arabian man of God) with a traditional message of salvation (modified by the influence of Rabbinic Judaism into the unmediated and finally immutable word of God).
How much of what the biblical writers believed about the supernatural world do I believe? They weren't us. We are products of the Enlightenment; they were not. So let's stop denying that reality. Rather than sitting in judgment on them from our Enlightenment perches, we ought to have them sit in judgment on us when it comes to informing us about the supernatural world. After all, what they wrote was ultimately overseen by God.
And then there are encouragements to use heterosexual pornography or heterosexual images to encourage heterosexual attraction. I find it a golden idol, honestly, where we have been hypocritical to ask people to resolve this issue in a way that we haven't encouraged other people with other struggles to resolve. I'm looking at offering biblical holiness, not an unrealistic expectation for people that will leave them disappointed.
Man is indeed lost, but that does not mean that he is nothing. We must resist humanism, but to make a man a zero is not the right way to resist it ... [The] Christian position is that man is made in the image of God and even though he is now a sinner, he can do things that are tremendous - he can influence history for this life and the life to come, for himself and for others...From the biblical viewpoint, man is lost, but great.
There is an old Italian proverb about the nature of translation: "Traddutore, traditore!" This means simply, "Translators-traitors!" Of course, as you can see, something is lost in the translation of this pithy expression: there is great similarity in both the spelling and the pronunciation of the original saying, but these get diluted once they are put in English dress. Even the translation of this proverb illustrates its truth!
When all of our idols are taken away, all our securities and defense mechanisms, we find out who we really are. We’re so little, so poor, so emptyand a shock to ourselves. But the Biblical God takes away our shame, and we are eventually able to present ourselves in an honest and humble form. Then we find out who we really are and who God is for usand it is more than enough. That is how an enslaved people became God’s people, Israel.
Christianity, if it is to triumph over pantheism, must absorb it. To our pusillanimous eyes Jesus would have borne the marks of a hateful pantheism, for he confirmed the Biblical phrase "ye are gods," and so would St. Paul, who tells us that we are of "the race of God." Our century wants a new theology - that is to say, a more profound explanation of the nature of Christ and of the light which it flashes upon heaven and upon humanity.
The biblical passage which says of Abraham and the three visiting angels: "And He stood over them under the tree and they did eat" is interpreted by Rabbi Zusya to the effect that man stands above the angels, because he knows something unknown to them, namely, that eating may be hallowed by the eater's intention.... Any natural act, if hallowed, leads to God, and nature needs man for what no angel can perform on it, namely, its hallowing.
There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.
Perhaps preachers today need to think about the assumptions that are common in their congregation - the plausibilities and comforting assurances - which may in themselves have biblical truth, but can easily become insurance policies waved around as immunity from any kind of serious evaluation of how we are living, whether we are truly following the Lord Jesus in the way he walked, whether we are doing righteousness and justice as God commanded.
The modern-day gospel says, 'God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Therefore, follow these steps, and you can be saved.' Meanwhile, the biblical gospel says, 'You are an enemy of God, dead in your sin, & in your present state of rebellion, you are not even able to see that you need life, much less to cause yourself to come to life. Therefore, you are radically dependent on God to do something in your life that you could never do.
Trusting God means transferring our confidence and hope from ourselves to him, acknowledging that we have no ability in ourselves to live in a way that pleases him. Only he can change us by the power of his Spirit in us. This trust is manifested in a context of obedience in our lives to the biblical mandates God calls us to pursue. Training means acting upon that trust by doing things that help us rely upon God more and live out his desire for us.
We can hardly say that the Pharisees had an accurate ‘knowledge’ of man when they pointed to the sins (the real sins) of publicans and sinners. This judgment, which separated knowledge of man from self-knowledge, was as nothing in God’s eyes. The Jew did not have a better understanding because he was able to judge the heathen. In the sphere of abstract morality this could possibly be said, but this is not Biblical morality - O man, who judgest others!
If I had to choose between the two ways of approaching the deity, I should prefer the existential relational way, to the abstract philosophical way. I think it is truer, or in any case, less misleading, to say that God is an old Jew with a white beard whom I love, than to say that God is the ground of being and meaning, or to say that God is a name denoting the ultimate mystery. I prefer the bold primitive colors of the Biblical way of describing God.
