Faith Quotes - Page 10

May the light of your soul extinguish all darkness.

Lailah Gifty Akita

May every living soul know eternal rest exist.

Lailah Gifty Akita

If I were to believe in God enough to call him a murderer, then I might also believe enough that he, as a spirit, exists beyond death; and therefore only he could do it righteously. For the physical being kills a man and hatefully sends him away, whereas God, the spiritual being, kills a man and lovingly draws him nigh.

Mist to mist, drops to drops. For water thou art, and unto water shalt thou return.

This is my greatest desire, to move heavenly onward.

Lailah Gifty Akita

So now the sky was falling. Maybe the end of the world. Maybe Jesus coming again. That suited her.White lights shot across the sky. She lost count. She stood and watched through Sidney's telescope and felt. For the first time in a year she wasn't ice cold all the way to her soul. It was as close as she could be to free in her stronghold of a home.Logic told her that the world probably wasn't coming to an end. That would be too easy. She hadn't had an easy day in her life.She pulled the telescope away from her eye and watched white slices of heavenly light. Content with the goosebumps of fear, her spirits rose. Assuming the world wasn't ending, she'd come to a good place out here. Her children were safe. She was safe-- bitterly lonely but safe.

It is not enough to believe. Believe must lead to change of attitude and conduct.

Lailah Gifty Akita

He who searches shall find the deity.

Lailah Gifty Akita

When faced with a difficult situation, do not panic but pray!

Lailah Gifty Akita

The heavens declare the glory of God.The heavens declare the majesty King.The heavens declare the marvellous Lord.The heavens declare the mighty Saviour.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Anyone who falls short of God’s grace, out of rage, can harm many.It our sacred duty to love, motivate and pray for one another, so we will all be under God’s grace.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Love is divineLove is pure.Love is noble.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Initially, the God of the Old Testament might seem overwhelming and domineering to you, or tyrannical, or perhaps even evil, which is good. It is the first telling that God is indeed God, by sheer definition, and not some ear-tickling fairy by which one in his depravity is guaranteed to find another form of stale romanticism or love at first sight. For such a first impression as the latter would be problematic to the essence of Christianity. Therefore the Christians are right in saying that the nature of imperfect men cannot ultimately co-exist with the nature of a perfect God; and that the hope of each man is now desperately found in God's sending of Christ.

We may have different points of arguments from perspectives of belief, faith and religion.But we must not hate each other. We are one human family.

Lailah Gifty Akita

You dare travel on sacred road, although you may not know the end.

Lailah Gifty Akita

May every soul reconnect to the Creator.

Lailah Gifty Akita

The break of a family is the break of society. We must never break the bond of love and peace that unite us in sacred harmony.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Jesus, unlike the founder of any other major faith, holds out hope for ordinary human life. Our future is not an ethereal, impersonal form of consciousness. We will not float through the air, but rather will eat, embrace, sing, laugh, and dance in the kingdom of God, in degrees of power, glory, and joy that we can't at the present imagine.

Timothy J. Keller

We fall on our knees in awe of God’s greatness.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Our faith is built in the dark, in the valleys, and during the back-breaking battles in life.

Any church that operates in prayerless and powerless Christianity spend their days and years conducting dust to dust rites in the burial grounds.

Steven Chuks Nwaokeke

Refusal to engage in spiritual warfare does not exempt you from being among the next casualties of war

Steven Chuks Nwaokeke

The bullshit detector is the biggest enemyof every religion."From: "Gesels van een imaginaire god"('Scourges of an imaginary god')

But I was immobilized—less by another’s static imposition than by my own static will. For the enemy had in thrall my power to choose, which he had used to make a chain for binding me. From bad choices an urge arises; and the urge, yielded to, becomes a compulsion; and the compulsion, unresisted, becomes a slavery—each link in this process connected with the others, which is why I call it a chain—and that chain had a tyrannical grip around me. The new will I felt stirring in me, a will to 'give you free worship' and enjoy what I yearned for, my God, my only reliable happiness, could not break away from the will made strong by long dominance. Two wills were mine, old and new, of the flesh, of the spirit, each warring on the other, and between their dissonances was my soul disintegrating.

Augustine of Hippo

I have concluded that the more we seek the Lord, with a passion for His worthiness, the more we are gripped with our neediness. Adoration cultivates desperation.

Daniel Henderson

A prayer culture is fueled by experience not explanation. A passion to seek the Lord in prayer is more caught than taught.

Daniel Henderson

A nation aimlessly drifting away from God is a nation for which prayer is a rudder and praise is a sail. And it is the man or woman on their knees that builds the former and gives wind to the latter.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

The length of the fall is dictated by how far we had climbed. The outcome of the fall is dictated by whether we’re holding on to that which we’re climbing, or we’re letting God hold onto us.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

We are quick to surrender that which we deem as long dead, when God is quick to restore that which He deems as never really having lived.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

If I must know something in order to believe in it, what I am able to believe in will be severely limited. If I choose to believe in something in order to know it, then what I believe in can be boundless.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Is my faith so terribly pathetic that I have diminished God to the point that I doubt His ability to survive in the very world that He came to save? Indeed, I have done exactly that. And all I need to do to beat that mentality is to remember that a baby born in a manger with every disadvantage imaginable stills lives today.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Growing up I sometimes imagined that for Christ's return perhaps He would appear as 'Black Jesus' to white people and 'White Jesus' to black people just to screw with the racists.

In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there.I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.

It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the valley like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, all the leaves of the hardwoods from here to Hudson’s Bay. It was as if the season’s colors were draining away like lifeblood, as if the year were molting and shedding. The year was rolling down, and a vital curve had been reached, the tilt that gives way to headlong rush. And when the monarch butterflies had passed and were gone, the skies were vacant, the air poised. The dark night into which the year was plunging was not a sleep but an awakening, a new and necessary austerity, the sparer climate for which I longed. The shed trees were brittle and still, the creek light and cold, and my spirit holding its breath.

Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings…They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn’t that have been a sight to see?

Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up-mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back.A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and then crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth’s surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any images. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture and lapse into dreamless sleep. Because we are living people, and because we are on the receiving end of beauty, another element necessarily enters the question. The texture of space is a condition of time. Time is the warp and matter the weft of woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurtling shuttle…tWhat I want to do, then, is add time to the texture, paint the landscape on an unrolling scroll, and set the giant relief globe spinning on it stand.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The surface of mystery is not smooth, any more than the planet is smooth; not even a single hydrogen atom is smooth, let alone a pine. Nor does it fit together; not even the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules are a perfect match, for, even after the atom of iron replaces the magnesium, long streamers of disparate atoms trail disjointedly from the rims of the molecule’s loops. Freedom cuts both ways. Mystery itself is as fringed and intricate at the shape of the air at times. Forays into mystery cut bays and fine fjords, but the forested mainland itself is implacable both in its bulk and in its most filigreed fringe of detail.

A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky’s stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off.tAt the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; it could have been a whelk or a scallop, a cowrie, limpet, or conch. The animal is long since dissolved, and its blood spread and thinned in the general sea. All you hold in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared so thin that it passes a faint pink light. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve. I long for the North where unimpeded winds would hone me to such a pure slip of bone. But I’ll not go northing this year. I’ll stalk that floating pole and frigid air by waiting here. I wait on bridges; I wait, struck, on forest paths and meadow’s fringes, hilltops and banksides, day in and day out, and I receive a southing as a gift. The North washes down the mountains like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, and pours across the valley; it comes to me. It sweetens the persimmons and numbs the last of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow’s seeded grasses and pokes it chilling fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and the earthworms deeper into the earth. The sun heaves to the south by day, and at night wild Orion emerges looming like the Specter over Dead Man Mountain. Something is already here, and more is coming.

I’m strangely comforted when I hear from scientists that human beings are the most complex creatures we know of in the universe, still, by far. Black holes are in their way explicable; the simplest living being is not. I lean a bit more confidently into the experience that life is so endlessly perplexing. I love that word. Spiritual life is a way of dwelling with perplexity—taking it seriously, searching for its purpose as well as its perils, its beauty as well as its ravages.

If you do not cultivate your life's environment, you will not captivate the worlds enlightenment.

Stop looking back when your future is ahead of you

Perhaps not everything happens for a reason. That is, until you make it so; because for everything there is a season, which can, in fact, become beautiful.

There is something magical and transformational about saying “yes” to God. When you take His hand, step out of that boat (your ordinary, comfortable life), and be brave. Instead of spending your lifetime living in fear and playing it safe, you boldly walk in obedience. God makes you brave.

I'd rather have a heart of goldThan all the treasure of the world.

Ana Claudia Antunes

Your deepest scars tell the world of your greatest triumphs.

Matshona Dhliwayo

You are as the sun; the world is your stage; even without an audience, shine.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Your end can be greater than your beginning: butterflies are the greatest proof of this.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The bad chapters of your life lead to the good ones if you keep turning the pages.

Matshona Dhliwayo

When you have the world on your shoulders, God alone can help you carry it.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Where the world only sees a seed, an optimist sees a tree.

Matshona Dhliwayo

If Noah waited for signs of rain to build an ark, he would have been swept away by the flood.

Matshona Dhliwayo

If you want your inner light to shine brighter, illuminate someone else’s.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Faith moves mountains, intelligence goes over them, wisdom goes around them, but love levels them.

Matshona Dhliwayo

A bird will only fall from the sky when it stops believing in its ability to fly, and a fish will only drown in water when it stops believing in its ability to swim.

Matshona Dhliwayo

If birds did not believe in their ability to fly, the sky would be empty.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Water your dreams with fear, and they will wilt; with doubt, and they will wither; with hope, and they will grow; with faith, and they will flourish.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Behind you, leave your enemies. Beside you, keep your family. Around you, maintain your friends. Within you, treasure God.

Matshona Dhliwayo

On a writer’s path there are always some level of pain and solitude, life and death, love and hate, longing and fullness of soul, romance and separation, contemplation and adventure. And each one of them is constantly walking side by side in my lifetime. Always reachable by a thought.

Frederick Vanderbuilt

It will be said that, although God’s law is inscribed in our hearts, Scripture is nevertheless the Word of God, and it is no more permissible to say of Scripture that it is mutilated and contaminated than to say this of God’s Word. In reply, I have to say that such objectors are carrying their piety too far, and are turning religion into superstition; indeed, instead of God’s Word they are beginning to worship likenesses and images, that is, paper and ink.

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