quotations and passages about Christianity

Christianity - Christianity 3

This coming to know Christ is what makes
Christian truth redemptive truth, the truth
that transforms, not just informs. . .

Harold Cooke Phillips

It is a great deal better to live a holy life than to talk about it.
Lighthouses do not ring bells and fire cannons to call
attention to their shining--they just shine.

Dwight L. Moody

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be
a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on the level with
the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell.
Either this man was, and is, the Son of God;
or else a madman or something worse.

C.S. Lewis

If you wish your children to be Christians you must really
take the trouble to be Christian yourselves. Those are the
only terms upon which the home will work the gracious miracle.

Woodrow Wilson

I maintain Christianity is a
life much more than a religion.

R.M. Moberly

It is the great work of nature
to transmute sunlight into life.
So it is the great end of Christian
living to transmute the light of
truth into the fruits of holy living.

Adoniram J. Gordon

The Christians do not commit adultery. They do not bear false witness.
They do not covet their neighbor's goods. They honor father and mother.
They love their neighbors. They judge justly. They avoid doing to others
what they do not wish done to them. They do good to their enemies. They are kind.

St. Aristides

Charles L. Allen

The Christian is not one who has gone all the way with Christ.
None of us has. The Christian is one who has found the right road.

When we were watching the distribution of clothing in Jordan, I found myself wondering what it would be like to be wearing the clothes of someone else; how it would be like always in someone else's shoes. Then it occurred to me that this is precisely what Christianity means--eternally being in someone else's shoes.

R. Paul Freed

The ship's place is in the sea, but God pity the ship when the sea gets into it.
The Christian's place is in the world, but God pity the Christians
if the world gets the best of them.

Anon

George
MacDonald

The whole history of the Christian life is a series of resurrections. . . Every time we find our hearts are troubled, that we are not rejoicing
in God, a resurrection must follow; a resurrection out of the night
of troubled thought into the gladness of the truth.

Christianity teaches that the human soul is directly related to God.
Such immediacy is the hallmark of the Divinity of the soul
and the center of our freedom.

Helmut Kuhn

This is what Christianity is for--to teach
people the art of Life. And its whole
curriculum lies in three words, "Learn of me."

Anon

A true Christian should have but one fear--lest he or she should not hope enough.

Walter Elliot

The purpose of Christianity is not to avoid difficulty, but to produce
a character adequate to meet it when it comes. It does not make life easy;
rather it tries to make us great enough for life.

James L. Christensen

Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life;
not a philosophy of life, but a living presence.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word.
It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he
or she makes him or herself a better human being than their nature
wants to be, if they followed their nature only.

William Faulkner

The root of the matter, if we want a stable world, is a very simple and old-fashioned thing,
a thing so simple that I am almost ashamed to mention it for fear of the derisive smile
with which wise cynics will greet my words. The thing I mean is love, Christian love,
or compassion. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a reason for courage,
an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty.

Bertrand Russell

I have an unquenchable desire to slow down and find my life going deeper in my walk with Christ.
I want to meet him in the depths of my soul, away from the stress and press of everything on top.
A relationship with Christ is the key to fulfilling our deepest longings. All of life is about filling
the void that sin and separation from him have created within. Filling the emptiness with piles of things,
earthly friendships, satisfying experiences, and sensual encounters ultimately proves to achieve less
than what we had hoped for. Christ is the only one who fits.

Joseph M. Stowell

Christianity was a difficult struggle for me for a very long time, mostly because of my logical/rational mindset and approach to life. I didn't choose the way my mind works, but I do have to respect it, and my mind didn't allow me to accept blindly much of the theology and dogma that I heard being preached at services I went to. I found it difficult to believe that so much was being taught that wasn't at all Biblical, and I didn't know what to do with that--if the New Testament is our Holiest text, shouldn't our beliefs come directly from there?

Reading the works of Ralph Waldo Trine and Emmet Fox has helped me a great deal in coming to terms with many of the doubts I've had, for they also approach their relationship with Christ from a practical, logical perspective. Helen Keller tells us to value the faith that doesn't come easily, for the faith that we struggle with becomes stronger through the struggles. The bottom line for me is this: Christ came to teach us how to live our lives so that they'll be fulfilling and full of love, and if we're to get all we can out of this life, we need to heed his words and make them a part of our lives.

Christianity is about reaching potential and loving unconditionally, not about following rules blindly and judging and condemning others. Christianity is about brother- and sisterhood in Christ, for a house divided simply cannot stand.

But teachings aside, we can't ignore Christ's claim to be God. As C.S. Lewis explains so well, this claim takes away the "great teacher" status that many give to Christ. Either Christ is God, or he's not. If he's not, he's making a claim that most of us would consider to be fanatical, and therefore his credibility as a teacher is shot. If he is, then we have to take him at his word, that he is God; and we also have to take him at his word that we are just as much God as he was, and that we can do greater things than he did if only we have faith.

There have been many horrible things done in the name of Christ and of God, but those have been the actions of people who were selfish or arrogant or afraid to lose their power, so they acted in un-Christian ways and passed their actions off as valid in the eyes of God. I cannot let my faith in Christ and God be swayed by the selfish and hurtful acts of others who don't want to take the responsibility necessary to live a Christian life and give up their futile attempts at control.

So I believe. I believe that God is with and in us, always, and that Christ knew this and lived this in order to show us many important things that we need to know if we're to live fulfilling lives. Christ taught us to love, to be responsible, and most importantly, to have faith in unity, God and life, to have faith that things will be fine if we let things work as they've been made to work, instead of trying to control every aspect of our lives ourselves. Now, I don't love as much as I could, and I sometimes shirk responsibility that I don't really want to have, and my faith often falls short so that I try to control things that are simply out of my control, but I try. And it's in the trying that I grow.

Christianity is not about rules and regulations--it's a way of life that was given to us so that we may make the most of this beautiful gift of life without the worries of what will happen to us when we die--instead of focusing on the fear of the unknown, we can focus on the beauty of the known.

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Jesus had the same needs we do as a human being. He needed food,
shelter, safety, and love. He showed us how God loved him and provided
for him. He showed us his need for rest when he pulled away from others
to a quiet place. He showed us how God wanted us to love our brothers
and sisters by loving the people around him. He showed us his need to
depend on God and for relationship with God when he prayed.

Betty Blaylock

When I look at Jesus' warm and intimate friendships, my heart fills with praise that Jesus was. . . a man.
A man of flesh-and-blood reality. His heart felt the sting of sympathy. His eyes glowed with tenderness.
His arms embraced. His lips smiled. His hands touched. Jesus was male! Jesus invites us to relate
to him as the Son of Man. And because he is fully man, we can relate to Jesus with affection and love.

Joni Erickson Tada

If Jesus is Lord then the only right response to him is surrender and obedience.
He is Savior and he is Lord. We cannot separate his demands from his love.
We cannot dissect Jesus and relate only to the parts that we like or need.
Christ died so that we could be forgiven for managing our own lives.
It would be impossible to thank Christ for dying and yet to continue running our own lives.

Rebecca Pippert

Jesus' ministry was clearly defined. . . . A choice was made--
life abundant, full, and free for all. Make no mistake about it,
the day the choice was made, Jesus became suspect.
That day in the temple he sealed the fate already prepared for him.
How was the world to understand one who rejected
an offer of power and control?

Joan B. Campbell

The essence of religion is that it releases in people a power and a force beyond human
capacity to generate, by which they may rise to a plane of existence in which they are
superior to everything life may bring them. There once lived a man who had the gift of
power to overcome anything the world could do to him; and through the years other
people, through contact with this man in spiritual communion, have found the same
power. Wistfully, we remember that once he said: "Verily, I say unto you, they that
believeth on me, the works that I do shall they do also; and greater works than these
shall they do." Why are we not "doing works" like that? What is wrong? His was a
way of living that made weakness and trouble drop away like withered leaves in the fall.
Is it a lost art? How shall we find it again?
If the art has been lost to many of us, what can we do? The answer is, go back and
examine it at its source. And when we go back and analyze the life of Jesus, the source
of his power, and of his Divine energy, we are impressed by his faith in God. He
believed God was near to him, using him. He believed in God with the faith of a child.
He kept in close contact and communion with God and as a result he was
an open channel for Divine energy.

Norman Vincent Peale

Once in a while there comes into the world one who from the very first recognises no separation of his life from the Father’s life, and who dwells continually in this living realisation; and by bringing anew to the world this great fact, and showing forth the works that will always and inevitably follow this realisation, he becomes in a sense a world’s saviour, as did Jesus, who, through the completeness of His realisation of the Father's life incarnate in Him, became the Christ Jesus. He in this way pointed out to the world how all men can enter into the realisation of the Christ-life and thus be saved from all impulse to sin. And so instead of coming to appease the vengeance of an angry God—difficult for one who has any adequate conception of God even to conceive of—He brought to the world, by exemplifying in His own life as well as by teaching to all who will hear His real message, the method whereby all of us can enter into the full and complete realisation of our oneness with the life of the tender and loving Infinite Father that dwells within.

Redeemed from the bondage of the senses through which alone sin comes, and born into the heavenly state, into life eternal, is everyone who comes into the same relations with the Father, and hence into the same realisation of their oneness with the Father's life, that Jesus came into. It is difficult, however, to see how anyone will be redeemed from the bondage of sin and enter into the heavenly state simply by believing that Jesus entered into it while here. No amount of believing that He lived the life He lived will take anyone into the heavenly state, but living the life that Jesus lived will take everyone who lives it there, in any age and in any time, even whether or not they know that such a man as Jesus ever lived.

Ralph Waldo Trine

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