#christianity

The work of Christ on the cross did not influence God to love us, did not increase that love by one degree, did not open any fount of grace or mercy in His heart. He had loved us from old eternity and needed nothing to stimulate that love. The cross is not responsible for God's love; rather it was His love which conceived the cross as the one method by which we could be saved. God felt no different toward us after Christ had died for us, for in the mind of God Christ had already died before the foundation of the world. God never saw us except through atonement. The human race could not have existed one day in its fallen state had not Christ spread His mantle of atonement over it. And this He did in eternal purpose long ages before they led Him out to die on the hill above Jerusalem. All God's dealings with man have been conditioned upon the cross. ↗

— A.W. Tozer

#christianity #cross #love #age

Our course heavenward is like the plan of the zealous pilgrim of old, who for every three steps forward, took one backward. ↗

— Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

#inspirational #inspirational

Sixteen of the thirty-eight parables of Jesus deal with money. One out of ten verses in the New Testament deals with that subject. Scripture offers about five hundred verses on prayer, fewer than five hundred on faith, and over two thousand on money. The believer's attitude toward money and possessions is determinative. ↗

— John MacArthur

#faith #faithfulness #money #possession #prayer

For if indeed God became a man, then Truth condescended to became a truth, from whose historical contingency one cannot simply pass to categories of universal rationality; and this means that whatever Christians mean when they speak of truth, it cannot involve simply the dialectical wrestling of abstract principles from intractable facts. (5) ↗

— David Bentley Hart

#christianity #eastern-orthodox #beauty

Every wedding must be an occasion of joy that human beings can do such great things, that they have been given such immense freedom and power to take the helm in their life’s journey… ↗

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#marriage #freedom

When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is 'acquainted with Grief', we listen, for that also is an Acquaintance of our own. ↗

— Emily Dickinson

#god #grief #jesus #religion #sorrow

All during that prison time I really lived by prayer. Be in prayer always, we're told, and back then I was. ↗

— Diet Eman

#prayer #prison #diet

Faith is the acknowledgment of the entire absence of all goodness in us, and the recognition of the cross as the substitute for all the want on our part. Faith saves, because it owns the complete salvation of another, and not because it contributes anything to that salvation. ↗

— Horatius Bonar

#faith #faith

Faith reminds us that change is always possible. ↗

— Jim Wallis

#christian-living #christianity #faith #politics #social-change

we unwittingly project onto God our own attitudes and feelings toward ourselves... But we cannot assume that He feels about us the way we feel about ourselves -- unless we love ourselves compassionately, intensely, and freely. ↗

— Brennan Manning

#compassion #feelings #god #love #attitude