Christian Quotes - Page 380

Most observers understand the difference between a committed Christian who accepts Jesus as a model for living and a 'cultural Christian' who happens to live in a nation with a Christian heritage. Most Muslims do not.

Christianity is not a purely intellectual, internal faith. It can only be lived in community.

I have found that lived out, the hardest place to be a Christian is to be in a nice prosperous country with a lot of entertainment options because there's so many distractions.

The self-sacrificing, servant aspect of the Christian life has many parallels to parenthood.

Whoever desires to remain faithful to Jesus must communicate faith as he did, not by compelling assent but by presenting it as a true answer to basic thirst. Rather than looking back nostalgically on a time when Christians wielded more power, I suggest another approach: that we regard ourselves as subversives operating within the broader culture.

We should be asking: How do we respond to a post-Christian society?

The Christian sees the world as a transitional home badly in need of rehab, and we are active agents in that project.

I ask God most often that we would be an unbroken line of Christians until Christ shall return.

Christians are simply pilgrims who acknowledge their lostness and their desire for help in finding the way.

Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive.

Christians fail to communicate to others because we ignore basic principles in relationship. When we make condescending judgments or proclaim lofty words that don't translate into action, or simply speak without first listening, we fail to love - and thus deter a thirsty world from Living Water. The good news about God's grace goes unheard.

Christians have an important role to play in contending that no human life is "devoid of value." We can do so through courageous protest, as happened in Germany, as well, as in compassionate care for the most vulnerable members of society, as Mother Teresa did. In both approaches theology - what one believes about God and human life - matters. The world desperately needs that good news.

We can’t expect the nation to operate by Christian principles… but we can expect this of the church.

The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake.

I don't expect Christians to see God as a metaphor, but that's what he is. Perhaps it might be clearer to call him a character in fiction, and a very interesting one too: one of the greatest and most complex villains of all - savage, petty, boastful and jealous, and yet capable of moments of tenderness and extremes of arbitrary affection - for David, for example. But he's not real, any more than Hamlet or Mr Pickwick are real. They are real in the context of their stories, but you won't find them in the phone book.

There is something new in the air. There is, there is a - a hunger for an open, non-dogmatic, form of Christian faith and practice, which adapts itself to a rapidly changing world; and speaks to that world the message of Jesus Christ. And a freedom to rediscover some of the language of the tradition now that's it's not handed down to us, you know, with a strict framework of doctrinal, fixed structures.

I always thought that the way to believe more deeply was to surround myself with other Christians. After all, isn't that the traditional tool for religious socialization?

A vision is something worth living for, and it is something worth dying for. In fact, if it is not worth dying for, it is not worth living for. Brave, godly martyrs throughout history have proven time and again that what we as Christians live for is worth dying for.

At first Disco Night wasn't meant to be a book, although I'm always thinking about that in the back of my mind. It started off as a series of exploratory road trips that I was doing with Christian Hansen, who I dedicated the book to.

I value the blood of one Christian more than that of a hundred Indians.

Few Christians go into media or the arts today, or see it as a primary mission field or battlefield. But it is.

I'd have to say, and I think that most Christians would hold the view, that there is such a thing as evil, and there are evil forces at work. You can articulate that by talking about Satan or the Devil; that's sound, Scriptural teaching.

With Christianity, freedom and equality became the two basic concepts of Europe; they are themselves Europe.

Here is book called I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, written by a couple of Christian apologists, which is essentially saying I don't pretend enough to know things I don't know to be an atheist.

Christians claim that life has no meaning if you stop pretending to know things you don't know, though they phrase it more tersely as life has no meaning without faith.