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Quotes by Theologian
"God always ignores the present perfection for the ultimate perfection."
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"Gaining heaven, being delivered from sin, and being made useful to God are things that should never even be a consideration in real surrender."
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"Temptations which accompany the working day will be conquered on the basis of the morning breakthrough to God. Decisions demanded by work become easier and simpler where they are made not in the fear of men but only in the sight of God. He wants to give us today the power which we need for our work."
13
"You say "But He has not answered." He has He is so near to you that His silence is the answer. His silence is big with terrific meaning that you cannot understand yet but presently you will."
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"We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there's nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all.Most of us would prefer, however, to spend our time doing something that will get immediate results. We don't want to wait for God to resolve matters in His good time because His idea of 'good time' is seldom in sync with ours."
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"By respect for life we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive."
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"There are vast areas of stubbornness and ignorance the Holy Spirit has to reveal in each of us, but it can only be done when Jesus gets us alone...Jesus cannot teach us anything until we quiet all our intellectual questions and get alone with Him."
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"If God sees that my spiritual life will be furthered by giving the things for which I ask then He will give them but that is not the end of prayer. The end of prayer is that I come to know God Himself."
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"Wherever a man turns he can find someone who needs him."
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"Just as God's love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in an infinite variety of concrete worldly action, and subject to misunderstanding and condemnation. Every attempt to portray a Christianity of 'pure' love purged of worldly 'impurities' is a false purism and perfectionism that scorns God's becoming human and falls prey to the fate of all ideologies. God was not too pure to enter the world."
12
"When we lose sight of God we become hard and dogmatic. We hurl our own petitions at God's throne and dictate to Him as to what we wish Him to do. We do not worship God, nor do we seek to form the mind of Christ. If we are hard towards God, we will become hard towards other people."
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"Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality."
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"While we exert ourselves to grow beyond our humanity, to leave the human behind us, God becomes human; and we must recognize that God wills that we be human, real human beings. While we distinguish between pious and godless, good and evil, noble and base, God loves real people without distinction."
12
"We act like pagans in a crisis--only one out of an entire crowd is daring enough to invest his faith in the character of God."
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"Testimony is an integral part of the Black religious tradition. It is the occasion where the believer stands before the community of faith in order to give account of the hope that is in him or her."
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"God never estimates what we give from impulse. We are given credit for what we determine in our hearts to give; for the giving that is governed by a fixed determination. The Spirit of God revolutionises our philanthropic instincts. Much of our philanthropy is simply the impulse to save ourselves an uncomfortable feeling. The Spirit of God alters all that. As saints our attitude towards giving is that we give for Jesus Christ's sake, and from no other motive."
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"In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you."
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"He is not concerned about making you blessed and happy right now, but He's continually working out His ultimate perfection for you..."
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"Prayer is not logical it is a mysterious moral working of the Holy Spirit."
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"The soul passeth from form to form; and the mansions of her pilgrimage are manifold."
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"When our will wholeheartedly enters into the prayer of Christ then we pray correctly."
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"The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime."
11
"If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God."
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"Even if it's a little thing do something for those who have need of help something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it."
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"Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events."
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"The greatest answer to prayer is that I am brought into a perfect understanding with God and that alters my view of actual things."
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"Our ordinary and reasonable service to God may actually compete against our total surrender to Him."
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"What hinders me from hearing is that I am taken up with other things. It is not that I will not hear God, but I am not devoted in the right place. I am devoted to things, to service, to convictions, and God may say what He likes but I do not hear Him."
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"So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus."
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"It is God's earth out of which man is taken. From it he has his body. His body belongs to his essential being. Man's body is not his prison, his shell his exterior, but man himself. Man does not "have" a body; he does not "have" a soul; rather he "is" body and soul. Man in the beginning is really his body. He is one. He is his body, as Christ is completely his body, as the Church is the body of Christ."
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"We must continually maintain an adventurous attitude toward Him, despite any potential personal risk."
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"Many of us do not continue to grow spiritually because we prefer to choose on the basis of our rights, instead of relying on God to make the choice for us."
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"We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace."
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"The whole meaning of prayer is that we may know God."
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"Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true."
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"The scriptures do not present us with a series of Christian types to be imitated according to choice, they preach to us in every situation the one Jesus Christ."
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"God's silences are His answers. If we only take as answers those that are visible to our senses we are in a very elementary condition of grace."
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"Never look for justice in this world, but never cease to give it."
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"It is a costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life."
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"Beware of surrender that is motivated by personal benefits that may result."
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"Prayer is God's answer to our poverty not a power we exercise to obtain an answer."
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"There is no joy in the soul that has forgotten what God prizes."
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"We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, and straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?"
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"It is not so true that "prayer changes things" as that prayer changes me and I change things. God has so constituted things that prayer on the basis of Redemption alters the way in which a man looks at things. Prayer is not a question of altering things externally but of working wonders in a man's disposition."
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"The touchstone of the Holy Spirit's work in us is the answer to our Lord's question: "Who do men say that the Son of Man is? Our Lord makes human destiny depend on that one thing, Who men say He is, because the revelation of Who Jesus is is only given by the Holy Spirit."
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"Discouragement is disillusioned self-love, and self-love may be love for my devotion to Jesus- not love for Jesus Himself."
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"Anything I cannot thank God for for the sake of Christ, I may not thank God for at all; to do so would be sin. ... We cannot rightly acknowledge the gifts of God unless we acknowledge the Mediator for whose sake alone they are given to us."
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"If you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things."
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"The Lord's questions always reveal the true me to myself."
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"No enthusiasm will ever stand the strain that Jesus Christ will put upon His worker, only one thing will, and that is a personal relationship to Himself which has gone through the mill of His spring-cleaning until there is only one purpose left--I am here for God to send me where He will."
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