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This
coming to know Christ is what makes
Christian truth
redemptive truth, the truth
that transforms, not just
informs. . .
Harold Cooke Phillips
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Christianity - Christianity
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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| 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. |
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| 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 |
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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 |
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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. |
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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 |
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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 |
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A true Christian should have but one fear--
lest he or she should not hope enough.
Walter Elliot
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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 |
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Christianity is not a theory or
speculation, but a life;
not a philosophy of life, but a living presence.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
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| William
Faulkner
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. |
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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 |
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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 |
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| 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 C.S. Lewis 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 come to earth through virgin birth, and that he died on
the cross to save us from sin. I have to go with the latter, for
there's far too much historical evidence that supports it.
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 watches over us, and that he
came down as Christ 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 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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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