#christianity

What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether. They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom. ↗

— N.T. Wright

#kingdom-of-god #life

If there is no element of asceticism in our lives, if we give free rein to the desires of the flesh (taking care of course to keep within the limits of what seems permissible to the world), we shall find it hard to train for the service of Christ. When the flesh is satisfied it is hard to pray with cheerfulness or to devote oneself to a life of service which calls for much self-renunciation. ↗

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#christ #christianity #discipleship #discipline #fasting

Dangerous Helpfulness. There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than afterwards to offer them their prescriptions for making life easier -- their Christianity, for example. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#life

Saint Augustine … insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#charity #christianity #saint-augustine #scripture #life

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#church #nihilism #philosophy #theology #logic

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall. ↗

— Randy Alcorn

#christianity #clarity #display #hoarding #horror

The normal Christian Life is not supposed to be an exhausting wrestling match with a dead man, but is an abundant, joy-filled life with God, salted with an occasional season of strong resistance from our archenemy. ↗

— Kris Vallotton

#life

Faith doesn't mean credulity; it means that the certainty remains about something which is not our actual present experience of things. ↗

— Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

#faith #orthodoxy #experience

It is hard for us to recognize it now, but Peter and Paul were introducing the first Christian family to an entirely new community, a community that transcends the rigid hierarchy of human institutions, a community in which submission is mutual and all are free. ↗

— Rachel Held Evans

#community #family #mutuality #submission #family

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. ↗

— Hélder Câmara

#christianity #communism #compassion #food #hunger