Theology Quotes - Page 11

Sanctification of the Spirit is the grace of salvation.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Rebellion leads to ruin.

Lailah Gifty Akita

The holiness of the gospel softens the hardness of the heart.

Lailah Gifty Akita

The path of prayer is forever bright.

Lailah Gifty Akita

My greatest fear is time wasted—a life spent. My greatest fear is passing away from this world without leaving a lasting impact.

Cold be night, cold be heart;I shall forever sit in dark, Until one day ride at FlightAgainst armies of Thalorion For last fight….

All life is bound to a simple truth... that time goes on, that in each person's life begins a tale, a tale that will either end in memory or in legend.

...we are to be lights in the world. It is God's business to light us, to set us on the lampstand, and to bring the people into the house. Our only duty is to shine forth with the gospel.

God's revelation... unmasks our illusions about ourselves. It exposes our pride, our individualism, our self-centeredness - in short, our sin. But worship also offers forgiveness, healing, transformation, motivation, and courage to work in the world for God's justice and peace - in short, salvation in its largest sense.

What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.

John Shelby Spong

We often use the Bible as a source for personal validation and defense, a sidekick and a shield, but these will prove ineffective without first the other part. We must also allow ourselves to be wounded by it. We tend to forget its authority - that it is a double-edged sword. Our decrepit, depraved hearts must be completely ripped out in order to welcome that of God.

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

The holiness of the gospel is its ability to pierced though the heart.

Lailah Gifty Akita

We being satiate with continual wars, let the desire of peace a little move us.

Erasmus

Through Neurotheology, I and my fellow scientists of twenty-first century have already taken the first step from the side of Science, to diminish the gap between Science and Religion. Now it is time for Religion to do the same.

A religion deeply rooted in theology, is never above skepticism hinged upon the twin pillars; of reason & facts.

Be careful not to appear obsessively intellectual. When intelligence fills up, it overflows a parody.

You can never make someone like something they don't like, but you can always help them to better understand it.

It is not that men become too intelligent for God,' says the Apologist, 'but rather they become too arrogant for intelligence.

It is better for you to read the Holy Bible, for your own enlightenment.

Lailah Gifty Akita

When you get to the junction of double mindedness in purposefulness, remember the will of God.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The human spirit is so utterly one with the body that the term "form" can be used of the body and retain its proper meaning. Conversely, the form of the body is spirit, and this is what makes the human being a person.

Pope Benedict XVI

All speculative theology, which rests on philosophical reasoning rather than biblical revelation, is at fault here. Paul tells us where this sort of theology ends: “The world by wisdom knew not God” (1 Cor 1:21 KJV). To follow the imagination of one’s heart in the realm of theology is the way to remain ignorant of God, and to become an idol-worshipper, the idol in this case being a false mental image of God, made by one’s own speculation and imagination.

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.

Ah! If you have a self-will in your hearts, pray to God to uproot it. Have you self-love? Beseech the Holy Spirit to turn it out; for if you will always will to do as God wills, you must be happy. I have heard of some good old woman in a cottage, who had nothing but a piece of bread and a little water, and lifting up her hands, she said, as a blessing, "What!? all this, and Christ too?" What is "all this," compared with what we deserve? And I have read of someone dying, who was asked if he wished to live or die; and he said, "I have no wish at all about it." "But if you might wish, which would you choose?" "I would not choose at all." "But if God bade you choose?" "I would beg God to choose for me, for I would not know which to take." Oh happy state! to be perfectly acquiescent, to lie passive in His hand, and know no will but His.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

We are saved only by grace through faith.

Lailah Gifty Akita

We ought to know the Lord and fullness of His great grace.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Walking in close fellowship with God is a spiritual self.

Lailah Gifty Akita

The grace of endurance is the great power of God at work within us.

Lailah Gifty Akita

I taught I had to be good to walk with God. And God said, “My grace is what you need to walk with me, than you will be good.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Proxy religion involves too great a risk: you had better see to your soul's matters yourself, and leave them in no man's hands.

Spurgeon

Jesus Christ, a Nazarene, lived in Nazareth.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Surely no rebel can expect the King to pardon his treason while he remains in open revolt. No one can be so foolish as to imagine that the Judge of all the earth will put away our sins if we refuse to put them away ourselves.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Thank God you have got a Father that can be angry, but that loves you as much when He is angry as when He smiles upon you.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Christ is to the souls of men what the sun is to the world. He is the center and source of all spiritual light, warmth, life, health, growth, beauty, and fertility. Like the sun, He shines for the common benefit of all mankind--for high and for low, for rich and for poor, for Jew and for Greek. Like the sun, He is free to all. All may look at Him, and drink health out of His light. If millions of mankind were mad enough to dwell in caves underground, or to bandage their eyes, their darkness would be their own fault, and not the fault of the sun. So, likewise, if millions of men and women love spiritual "darkness rather than light," the blame must be laid on their blind hearts, and not on Christ. "Their foolish hearts are darkened." (John 3:19; Romans 1:21.) But whether men will see or not, Christ is the true sun, and the light of the world. There is no light for sinners except in the Lord Jesus.

J.C. Ryle

Some of the simplest of truths are also some of the most difficult of truths, but such is Christianity: 'If it's not about Christ, it's not about life.

We live in a day of abounding vagueness and indistinctness on doctrinal subjects in religion. Now, if ever, it is the duty of all advocates of clear, well-defined, sharply-cut theology, to supply proof that their views are thoroughly borne out by Scripture.

J.C. Ryle

Above all the studies in the world, study your own hearts; waste not a minute more of your precious time about frivolous & unsubstantial controversies. My dear flock, I have, according to the grace given me, labored in the course of my ministry among you, to feed you with the heart strengthening bread of practical doctrine, and I do assure you, it is far better you should have the sweet and saving impressions of gospel truths, feelingly and powerfully conveyed to your hearts, than only to understand them by a bare ratiocination, or a dry syllogistical inference. Leave trifling studies to such as have time lying on their hands and know not how to employ it. Remember you are at the door of eternity, and have other work to do. Those hours you spend upon heart-work in your closets, are the golden spots of all your time and will have the sweetest influence up to your last hour.

Moreover God hath ordained man in this world, as it were, the very image of himself, to the intent, that he, as it were a god on earth, should provide for the wealth of all creatures.

Erasmus

It takes courage to share your gifting, but when you do, you have authority and a life changing attitude

Ergo, while the Argument from Design appears to be a nice, neat answer to account for the presence of a multifarious Universe, the truth is that it backfires on itself, shifting the need for an explanation back and back and back…and back…without end, without resolution. This is called an infinite regress, and its presence in the logic of the argument fails to prove the existence of God; if anything, it reveals that the idea of a designer is patently ridiculous, even more so than a godless Cosmos. The argument therefore answers nothing; it merely moves the mystery of origins to an even higher level, demanding that the Creator have his own Creator.

Michael Vito Tosto

To illustrate the nature of this theandric reciprocity, Thomas invokes, as an example, the physical touch of Jesus’s hand: “he wrought divine things humanly, as when he healed the leper with a touch.” The touch of a human being is not in itself miraculous, and even in Jesus this human action is not humanly healing. The miraculous fact of the healing power of this human touch, rather, as Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange puts it, “proceeds from God as the principal cause and from Christ’s human nature as the instrumental cause.” Jesus works divine things humanly. More ultimately, Jesus wills the divine will of salvation humanly. And so he wills theandrically in the sense that what he wills has an “infinite value” that “derives from the divine suppositum that is the agent which operates”. The deifying effects of the Incarnation are thus contingent on the theandric fact of the interpenetrating unity of divine-human operations.

There may be a theology without the Scriptures — a theology of nature, gathered by painful, and slow, and sometimes doubtful processes from what man sees around him in external nature and the course of history, and what he sees within him of nature and of grace. In like manner there may be and has been an astronomy of nature, gathered by man in his natural state without help from aught but his naked eyes, as he watched in the fields by night. But what is this astronomy of nature to the astronomy that has become possible through the wonderful appliances of our observatories? The Word of God is to theology as, but vastly more than, these instruments are to astronomy. It is the instrument which so far increases the possibilities of the science as to revolutionize it and to place it upon a height from which it can never more descend. What would be thought of the deluded man, who, discarding the new methods of research, should insist on acquiring all the astronomy which he would admit, from the unaided observation of his own myopic and astigmatic eyes? Much more deluded is he who, neglecting the instrument of God’s Word written, would confine his admissions of theological truth to what he could discover from the broken lights that play upon external nature, and the faint gleams of a dying or even a slowly reviving light, which arise in his own sinful soul. Ah, no! The telescope first made a real science of astronomy possible: and the Scriptures form the only sufficing source of theology.

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield

Theology is the systematic inquiry into Scripture. Theology is a human attempt to make sense of and draw conclusions from God's special revelation.

[L]et it be remembered that atheism … is the secret of religion … ; religion … in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Today we have different idols. . . We have trusted in human reason, science, and technology to solve our problems and progress toward a better world and a prosperous life. Yet idolatry brings death.

Craig G. Bartholomew

So when the ruling ideology enjoins us to enjoy sex, not to feel guilty about it, since we are not bound by any prohibitions whose violations should make us feel guilty, the price we pay for this absence of guilt is anxiety.

What does hanging on a cross for twenty-four hours mean to a man who has no children,' I said, 'especially when he knows he's dying for a good cause -- indeed, that he's saving the whole world and then going straight into the best place in Heaven? What's that compared to the suffering I've had to put up with for months and years with the house full of children, when for many whole nights I've shrieked with pain unceasingly and without relief, and I'll soon be dead, and that without having anything to die for; and there'll be no heavenly Kingdom for me, for I know the children will go on crying when I'm dead, and swearing and quarrelling, and begging for milk they can't get.

Halldór Laxness

Christ is our all. He is everything to the Christian. He fills all, is in all, and He is our life (Colossians 3:4, 11). It is in Him that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden (Colossians 2:3). He is the author and finisher of our salvation, the one who starts it, works it out, and completes it (Hebrews 12:2). This is as the Father wanted it. He places His people in the hands of the Son, having joined them to the Son in a super-natural union, so the Son, by His perfect life of obedience, and perfect act of self-sacrifice upon the cross, can bring about their full and complete salvation.

Many in our world today want us to believe that we can except Christ simply as a Savior from sin, but not the Lord of our lives. They teach essentially that a person can perform an act of believing on Christ once, and after this, they can fall away even into total unbelief and yet still supposedly be "saved". Christ does not call men in this way. Christ does not save men in this way. The true Christian is the one continually coming, always believing in Christ. Real Christian faith is an ongoing faith, not a one-time act. If one wishes to be eternally satiated, one meal is not enough. If we wish to feast on the bread of heaven, we must do so all our lives. We will never hunger or thirst if we are always coming and always believing in Christ. He's our sufficiency. Christ the bread from heaven. We must feed on all of Christ, not just the parts we happen to like. Christ is not the Savior of anyone unless He is their Lord as well.

That Christ has from the beginning been intending to point His hearers to Himself as the source of all spiritual life is plain from the language He uses. The hunger and thirst that He satisfies is not physical hunger or physical thirst. Instead, the one who "hungers after righteousness" is the one who finds satisfaction in Christ Jesus. There is no limit to the supply of spiritual food that can be provided by Christ the Lord. His is a never-ending store of satisfaction for all who hunger and thirst for truth and righteousness.

The influence of the Sermon on the Mount is truly past reckoning. Any rational human being with a conscientious mind is bound to be influenced by its exuberant content regardless of religious background.

Real comfort is found when I understand that I am held in the hollow of the hand of the One who created and rules all things. The most valuable thing in my life is God's love, a love that no one can take away. When my identity is rooted in him, the storms of trouble will not blow me away. This is the comfort we offer people. We don't comfort them by saying things will work out. They may not. The people around them may change, but they may not. The Bible tells us again and again that everything around us is in the process of being taken away. God and his love are all that remain as cultures and kingdoms rise and fall. Comfort is found by sinking our roots into the unseen reality of God's ever-faithful love.

Paul David Tripp

He (Jesus) gave up his life not because of the so-called sins of humanity, but because he was too adamant to give in to orthodox monstrosity.

[God] sees before Him in fact a self-centred, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human animal. But He says "Let us pretend that this is not a mere creature, but our Son. It is like Christ in so far as it is a Man, for He became Man. Let us pretend that it is also like Him in Spirit. Let us treat it as if it were what in fact it is not. Let us pretend in order to make the pretence into a reality." God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one. I daresay this idea of a divine makebelieve sounds rather strange at first. But, is it so strange really? Is not that how the higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does.

During the reign of Domitian (81-96 A.D.), Christians in Asia Minor were severely oppressed. The book of Revelation was likely written at this time to encourage them not to apostatize and not even to compromise their faith. No doubt some believers felt that they could meet the demands of the state without denying their master. They could argue that calling Christ 'Lord' and calling Caesar 'Lord' were not in conflict, since the term Lord could mean Sir as well as God. And as far as the Roman government was concerned, what people believed in secret made no difference so long as they observed the outward ceremonies required by law.

F. Calvin Parker

Toyohiko Kagawa, famed for his ministry to slum-dwellers, paid tribute to all three of Japan's major religious traditions. 'I am grateful for Shinto, for Buddhism, and for Confucianism,' he wrote. To Shinto he attributed his spirit of reverence; to Buddhism, his craving for transcendent values, including compassion and selflessness; to Confucianism, his efforts to follow the golden mean of humaneness and harmony in society. Kagawa saw Christ in the priestly robes of all these religions.

F. Calvin Parker

The literal sense of the author was "creation is the orderly act of a loving Creator God." What the modern reader often hears, however, is "The universe was made in six 24-hour days." This is as wrong-headed as taking me to mean I actually stood in line a million years or that my cardiac tissue has been torn in half or that Christ had delusions of being a grape plant.-- Making Senses of Scripture

Mark Shea

From the very beginning of the movement in the sixteenth century, Anabaptists shared a deep suspicion of the so-called Schriftgelehrten - the university-trained scholars who, they claimed artfully dodged the clear and simple teachings of Jesus by appealing to complex arguments and carefully crafted statements of doctrine. In other words, they confused theological discussions with lived faith.

Throughout history, Christians have faced the persistent temptation of confusing the language we use to talk about God with the essence of Christian faith. This stubborn human tendency to turn doctrine into an idol - to confuse a human creation with the truth itself - can easily lead people to wield doctrinal claims as a weapon against minority or dissenting perspectives. Thus, anyone who does not line up with a certain formulation of Christian faith is not only wrong, but also a heretic and therefore worthy of punishment or death.

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