Jesus Quotes

“The point is not that Jesus was a good guy who accepted everybody, and thus we should do the same (though that would be good). Rather, his teachings and behavior reflect an alternative social vision. Jesus was not talking about how to be good and how to behave within the framework of a domination system. He was a critic of the domination system itself.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith

“A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain...This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines - they are a way of sowing to the Spirit... By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done.”
― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

“God is here. This truth should fill our lives, and every Christmas should be for us a new and special meeting with God, when we allow his light and grace to enter deep into our soul.”
― Josemaría Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By

“You think that your laws correct evil - they only increase it. There is but one way to end evil - by rendering good for evil to all men without distinction.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Christians and the Law-Courts

“He loves Thee too little, who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for Thy sake.”
― St. Augustine

“Jesus soon is coming,
and Christmas too,
Good reason for being happy,
Helping people to do.”
― Miguel Ángel Sáez Gutiérrez «Marino», Zori 1ª Parte

“May the God who gives endurance and encouragement
give you a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow
Christ Jesus, so that with one heart and mouth you may
glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: King James Version

“At Sunday worship, as in every dimension of our existence, many of us pretend to believe we are sinners. Consequently, all we can do is pretend we have been forgiven. As a result, our whole spiritual life is pseudo-repentance and pseudo-bliss.”
― Brennan Manning

“Remember: He WANTS your fellowship, and He has done everything possible to make it a reality. He has forgiven your sins, at the cost of His own dear Son. He has given you His Word, and the priceless privilege of prayer and worship.”
― Billy Graham, Hope for Each Day: Words of Wisdom and Faith

“I believe Jesus wasn't thinking about miracle when He performed it.
He's just doing normal activities as he did in His heavenly kingdom.”
― Toba Beta

“The beauty of the ragamuffin gospel lies in the insight it offers into Jesus: the essential tenderness of His heart, His way of looking at the world, His mode of relating to you and me. 'If you really want to understand a man, don't just listen to what he says, but watch what he does.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
― Anonymous, Holy Bible: New International Version

“Jesus was not a man for others. He was one with others. There is a world of difference in that. Jesus didn't seek the rights of lepers. He touched the leper even before he got around to curing him. He didn't champion the cause of the outcast. He was the outcast. He didn't fight for improved conditions for the prisoner. He simply said, 'I was in prison.'

The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place—with the outcast and those relegated to the margins.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“It was by faith, nothing wavering, that Joseph saw God our Eternal Father and Jesus Christ, His Son.”
― Thomas S. Monson

“If we have never sought, we seek Thee now;
Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;
We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow,
We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars.
The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;
In all the universe we have no place.
Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?
Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars, we claim Thy grace.
If, when the doors are shut, Thou drawest near,
Only reveal those hands, that side of Thine;
We know to-day what wounds are, have no fear,
Show us Thy Scars, we know the countersign.
The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.”
― Edward Shillito

“For the Lord touched all parts of creation, and freed and undeceived them all from every deceit.”
― St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation

“Therefore, my brothers, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you.
Acts 13:38”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: King James Version

“The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your love, O Lord, endures forever - do not abandon the works of your hands.”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: King James Version

“For me to live is Christ and to die is gain
Phillippians 1:21”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: King James Version

“Sooner or later I will be faced with the fact that the world is helpless to meet my needs. And at that point, I will be left with two conclusions; that life is cruel or God is real.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that 'all the world,' namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait? And could spiritual subtlety imagine any more dangerous bait than this? Anything to equal the enticing, intoxicating, overwhelming, and undermining power of that symbol of the 'holy cross,' that ghastly paradox of a 'God on the cross,' that mystery of an unimaginable ultimate cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo

“He [Jesus] had a terrible temper, you know, undoubtedly inherited from His Father.”
― Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

“Child," she said placing her head to mine and her callused fingers on my cheek, "you can whip it and beat it senseless, you can drag it through the streets and spin on it, you can even dangle it from a tree, drive spikes trough it, and drain the last breath from it, but in the end, no matter what you do, and no matter how hard you try to kill it, love wins.”
― Charles Martin, Wrapped in Rain

“It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book On God] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become rolled into one. 'How can we not face up to the fact that if God is All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.'

Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled 'theologians', whereas it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers, have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as “karmic reassignment”) manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: 'In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!)'

I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as the author of Harlot's Ghost and The Armies of the Night.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Lowe has broken from the Christianity of his parents, a faith that now seems hopelessly out of date. The meek shall no longer inherit the earth; the go-getters will get it and everything that goes with it. The Christ who went among the poor, the sick, the downtrodden, among lepers and prostitutes, really had no marketing savvy. He has been transfigured into a latter-day entrepreneur, the greatest superstar sales person of all time, who built a multinational outfit from scratch.”
― Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

“He was without any comforts of God — no feeling that God loved him — no
feeling that God pitied him — no feeling that God supported him. God was his
sun before — now that sun became all darkness… He was without God — he
was as if he had no God. All that God had been to him before was taken from
him now. He was Godless — deprived of his God. He had the feeling of the
condemned, when the Judge says: “Depart from me, ye cursed,” “who shall
be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and
from the glory of his power.” He felt that God said the same to him. Ah! This is
the hell which Christ suffered. The ocean of Christ’s sufferings is
unfathomable… He was forsaken in the [place] of sinners. If you close with him
as your surety, you will never be forsaken… “My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?” [The answer?] For me — for me.”
― Robert Murray McCheyne

“Before one can walk as Christ walked,
and talk as He talked,
he must first begin to think as Christ thought.”
― A A Allen

“We spend more time asking what would Jesus do instead of what did Jesus do.”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Jesus + Nothing = Everything

“God is fucking stealing souls again!”
― Stephen Adly Guirgis, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot

“Every action is a losing, a letting go, a passing away from oneself of some bit of one’s own reality into the existence of others and of the world. In Jesus Christ, this character of action is not resisted, by trying to use our action to assert ourselves, extend ourselves, to impose our will and being upon situations. In Jesus Christ, this self-expending character of action is joyfully affirmed. I receive myself constantly from God’s Parenting love. But so far as some aspects of myself are at my disposal, these I receive to give away. Those who would live as Jesus did—who would act and purpose themselves as Jesus did—mean to love, i.e., they mean to expend themselves for others unto death. Their being is meant to pass away from them to others, and they make that meaning the conscious direction of their existence.

Too often the love which is proclaimed in the churches suppresses this element of loss and need and death in activity. As a Christian, I often speak of love as helping others, but I ignore what this does to the person who loves. I ignore the fact that love is self-expenditure, a real expending and losing and deterioration of the self. I speak of love as if the person loving had no problems, no needs, no limits. In other words, I speak of love as if the affluent dream were true. This kind of proclamation is heard everywhere. We hear it said: 'Since you have no unanswered needs, why don’t you go out and help those other people who are in need?' But we never hear people go on and add: 'If you do this, you too will be driven into need.' And by not stating this conclusion, people give the childish impression that Christian love is some kind of cornucopia, where we can reach to everybody’s needs and problems and still have everything we need for ourselves. Believe me, there are grown-up persons who speak this kind of nonsense. And when people try to live out this illusory love, they become terrified when the self-expending begins to take its toll. Terror of relationship is [that] we eat each other.

But note this very carefully: like Jesus, we too can only live to give our received selves away freely because we know our being is not thereby ended, but still and always lies in the Parenting of our God....

Those who love in the name of Jesus Christ... serve the needs of others willingly, even to the point of being exposed in their own neediness.... They do not cope with their own needs. They do not anguish over how their own needs may be met by the twists and turns of their circumstances, by the whims of their society, or by the strategies of their own egos. At the center of their life—the very innermost center—they are grateful to God, because... they do not fear neediness. That is what frees them to serve the needy, to companion the needy, to become and be one of the needy.”
― Arthur C. McGill, Dying Unto Life