#christianity

I finally knew... why Christ's prayer in the garden could not be granted. He had been seeded and birthed into human flesh. He was one of us. Once He had become mortal, He could not become immortal except by dying. That He prayed the prayer at all showed how human He was. That He knew it could not be granted showed his divinity; that He prayed it anyhow showed His mortality, His mortal love of life that His death made immortal. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#christianity #jesus #death

When I was trying to earn Jesus by being good, I missed the real Jesus who wants us to love him and serve him not for what he gives but for who he is—dangerous, unpredictable, radical, and amazing. ↗

— Jefferson Bethke

#dangerous #jesus #jesus-christ #radical #love

We ought not to be in too much of a hurry here to speak piously of God’s will and guidance. It is obvious, and it should not be ignored, that it is your own very human wills that are at work here, celebrating their triumph; the course that you are taking at the outset is one that you have chosen for yourselves… ↗

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#marriage #marriage

Christianity . . . sees the necessity for man to have spiritual values and it shows him how to get at those through physical sacraments. ↗

— Malcolm Muggeridge

#christianity #inspirational #life #spiritual #inspirational

The difference between this waiting period and the wait that I had already been enduring was that I was no longer hoping that he would see me, wishing that he would work, or wondering if he would care. Instead, I knew that he would be at work in my marriage, and that somehow, someway, someday he would be glorified through our sufferings. ↗

— Tracie Miles

#god #hope #waiting #wish #marriage

Any mature, spiritually sensitive view of marriage must be built on the foundation of mature love rather than romanticism. But this immediately casts us into a countercultural pursuit. ↗

— Gary L. Thomas

#marriage #romance #love

How could the Christian Church, apparently quite willingly, accommodate this weird megalomaniac [Constantine] in it's theocratic system? Was there a conscious bargain? Which side benefited most form this unseemly marriage between church and state? Or, to put it another way, did the empire surrender to Christianity, or did Christianity prostitute itself to the empire? It is characteristic of the complexities of early Christian history that we cannot give a definite answer to this question. ↗

— Paul Johnson

#history #marriage

Love is sacrifice. Love sacrifices itself for its neighbor. ↗

— Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

#eastern-orthodoxy #inspirational #love #neighbor #sacrifice

Suffering often draws us closer to God. Instead of being a sign of God's punishment or distance, suffering can purify us, lead us into the heart of God, and transform our souls. ↗

— Allen R. Hunt

#christ #christianity #god #inspirational #jesus

Jan van Leyden announced that a new world order [anabaptism] had been revealed to him and promptly began to implement it. Money was abolished; polygamy was legalized; marriage was made compulsory for women. Those who dissented faced execution. ↗

— Alister E. McGrath

#christianity #reformation #marriage