Sermon quotes on faith
Bernard of Clairvaux
I believe though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol.
V. Raymond Edman
Never doubt in the dark what God showed you in the light
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are to subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.
Max Lucado
Faith is not the belief that God will do what you want. It is the belief that God will do what is right.
Martin Luther
Faith is a free surrender and a joyous wager on the unseen, unknown, untested goodness of God.
Martin Luther
All those who do not at all times trust God and do not in all their works or sufferings, life and death, trust in His favor, grace and good-will, but seek His favor in other things or in themselves, do not keep this [First] Commandment, and practice real idolatry, even if they were to do the works of all the other Commandments, and in addition had all the prayers, obedience, patience, and chastity of all the saints combined. For the chief work is not present, without which all the others are nothing but mere sham, show and pretense, with nothing back of them… If we doubt or do not believe that God is gracious to us and is pleased with us, or if we presumptuously expect to please Him only through and after our works, then it is all pure deception, outwardly honoring God, but inwardly setting up self as a false [savior]….
Toby Mckeehan
Faith isn’t a feeling; it’s a choice to trust God even when the road ahead seems uncertain.
Eugene Peterson
The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at the …moment.
Taken from Run with the Horses by Eugene H. Peterson. ©2009, 2019 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove IL 60515-1426. www.ivpress.com
Eugene Peterson
Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying.
And hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion or fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain. It means a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do. It is imagination put in the harness of faith. It is a willingness to let God do it his way and in his time. It is the opposite of making plans that we demand that God put into effect, telling him both how and when to do it. That is not hoping in God but bullying God. “I pray to GOD-my life a prayer-and wait for what he’ll say and do. My life’s on the line before God, my Lord, waiting and watching till morning, waiting and watching till morning.”
A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society
Hudson Taylor
Unless there is an element of risk in our exploits for God, there is no need for faith.
Corrie Ten Boom
Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.
Alexis De Tocqueville
I am ignorant of His designs, but I will not cease to believe in them because I cannot penetrate them. And I will prefer to doubt my own lights rather than His justice.
A.W. Tozer
Faith is seeing the invisible, but not the nonexistent.
Elie Wiesel
My tradition teaches that no heart is as whole as a broken heart, and I would say that no faith is as solid as a wounded faith.
Blaise Pascal
In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.
John Stott
Faith’s only function is to receive what grace offers.
A.T. Robertson
Grace is God’s part, faith ours.
Word Pictures in the New Testament, Volume 4
Luke Norsworthy
For some, faith begins with a hard shell, a rigid set of answers and platitudes that keep them safe but eventually prevent them from growing into who they could be. The system that was initially protecting them now traps them.
God over Good: Saving Your Faith by Losing Your Expectations of God. Baker Publishing Group.
Darth Vader
I find your lack of faith—disturbing.
Kevin DeYoung
Faith and good works are both necessary. But one is the root and the other the fruit.
Taken from The Hole in Our Holiness by Kevin DeYoung, © 2012, p.28. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.
A.T. Robertson
Grace is God’s part, faith ours.
Word Pictures in the New Testament, Volume 4
Source Unknown
Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est—To be properly human, you must go beyond the merely human.
Taken from E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, Perennial Library.
Dorothy Day
The only conclusion I have ever been able to reach is that we must pray God to increase our faith, a faith without which one cannot love or hope. ‘Lord I believe, help though my unbelief.’
Nancy Ortberg
Someone once said that faith is not a personal possession until you have suffered. That person understood that the very nature of faith requires the grit and courage to be in the dark so you can eventually see in the dark. Then faith becomes faith.
Emil Brunner
In Christianity faith in the Mediator is not something optional, not something about which, in the last resort, it is possible to hold different opinions, if we are only united on the ‘main point’. For faith in the Mediator – in the event which took place once for all, a revealed atonement – is the Christian religion itself; it is the ‘main point’; it is not something alongside of the centre; it is the substance and kernel, not the husk. This is so true that we may even say: in distinction from all other forms of religion, the Christian religion is faith in the one Mediator…And there is no other possibility of being a Christian than through faith in that which took place once for all, revelation and atonement through the Mediator.
Eugene Peterson
I want to provide fresh documentation that the only way that any one of us can live at our best is in a life of radical faith in God.
Taken from Run with the Horses by Eugene H. Peterson. ©2009, 2019 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove IL 60515-1426. www.ivpress.com
C.S. Lewis
We don’t come to Him as bad people trying to become good people; we come as rebels to lay down our arms.
George Mueller
If we desire our faith to be strengthened, we should not shrink from opportunities where our faith may be tried, and therefore, through trial, be strengthened.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.
Stanley Baldwin
I am one of those who would rather sink with faith than swim without it.
Curt Thompson
We are invariably made for faith, to operate out of a need to trust something we cannot control.
Abraham Heschel
Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind—these are all a drive toward [loving the One] who rings our heart like a bell.
Abraham Heschel
Faith like Job’s cannot be shaken because it is the result of having been shaken.
George Muller
Faith does not operate in the realm of the possible. There is no glory for God in that which is humanly possible. Faith begins where man’s power ends.
V. Raymond Edman
Faith is dead to doubts—
dumb to discouragements,
blind to impossibilities,
knows nothing but success.
Faith lifts its hand up through
the threatening clouds,
lays hold of Him who has
all power in heaven and on earth.
Faith makes the uplook good,
the outlook bright,
the inlook favorable,
and the future glorious.
Clement of Alexandria
Faith is a voluntary anticipation.
J. Gresham Machen
The N. T. never says that a man is saved on account of his faith, but always that he is saved through his faith, or by means of his faith; faith is merely the means which the Holy Spirit uses to apply to the individual soul the benefits of Christ’s death.
What is Faith, p. 180.
A.W. Tozer
The man of pseudo-faith will fight for his verbal creed but refuse flatly to allow himself to get in a predicament where his future must depend upon that creed being true. He always provides himself with secondary ways of escape; so that he will have a way out if the roof caves in. What we need very badly these days is a company of Christians who are prepared to trust God as completely now as they know that they must do at that last day.
D.L. Moody
Faith is the gift of God. So is the air, but you have to breathe it; so is bread, but you have to eat it; so is water, but you have to drink it.
Paul E. Little
Belief doesn’t create truth. Unbelief doesn’t destroy truth. Christian faith goes beyond reason but not against reason.
Michael Gerson
Faith, thankfully, does not preclude doubt. It consists of staking your life on the rumor of grace.
“I was hospitalized for depression: Faith helped me remember how to live”
Austin Fischer
By misinterpreting the Enlightenment and the corresponding rise of empiricism as an existential threat to Christian faith, many frightened Christians sequestered themselves into rooms of certitude.
Taken from Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt by Austin Fischer. Copyright (c) 2018 by Austin Fischer. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Austin Fischer
Christianity has suffered more casualties from faux faith than from honest doubt.
Taken from Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt by Austin Fischer. Copyright (c) 2018 by Austin Fischer. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Austin Fischer
Faith is not the absence of doubt. Faith is the presence of love.
Taken from Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt by Austin Fischer. Copyright (c) 2018 by Austin Fischer. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Kevin DeYoung
Faith and good works are both necessary. But one is the root and the other the fruit.
Taken from The Hole in Our Holiness by Kevin DeYoung, © 2012, p.28. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.
John Ortberg
It’s better to have little faith in a big God than to have big faith in a little god. That’s why Jesus said we just need faith like a mustard seed.
John Ortberg
We live in an age when belief comes hard because we’re much more afraid of being gullible (believing something that’s not true) than we are of being skeptical (not believing something that is true). We often speak of “honest doubt” and “blind faith,” but never of “honest faith” or “blind doubt” (though both exist).
Austin Fischer
Faith is not the absence of doubt. Faith is the presence of love.
Taken from Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt by Austin Fischer. Copyright (c) 2018 by Austin Fischer. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
George Mueller
If we desire our faith to be strengthened, we should not shrink from opportunities where our faith may be tried, and therefore, through trial, be strengthened.
Stanley Baldwin
I am one of those who would rather sink with faith than swim without it.
Terry Tempest Williams
Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life. It allows us to live by the grace of invisible strands. It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own. Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact.
Dallas Willard
This is an age for spiritual heroes—a time for men and women to be heroic in faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low.
The Spirit of the Disciplines (New York: HarperCollins, 1988).
Flannery O’Connor
People…think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross…You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty.
Gerhard von Rad
The search for knowledge can go wrong, not as a result of individual, erroneous judgments or of mistakes creeping in at different points, but because of one single mistake at the beginning… Faith does not — as is popularly believed today — hinder knowledge; on the contrary, it is what liberates knowledge [and] enables it really to come to the point.
Wisdom in Israel, SCM Press, 1972, p. 67-68.
A.W. Tozer
The man of pseudo faith will fight for his verbal creed but refuse flatly to allow himself to get into a predicament where his future must depend upon that creed being true. He always provides himself with secondary ways of escape so he will have a way out if the roof caves in. What we need very badly these days is a company of Christians who are prepared to trust God as completely now as they know they must do at the last day.
John Calvin
We shall now have a full definition of faith if we say that it is a firm and sure knowledge of the divine favor toward us, founded on the truth of a free promise in Christ, and revealed to our minds, and sealed on our hearts, by the Holy Spirit.
Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.2.7
Alvin Plantinga
Now faith is not just a cognitive affair: its being “sealed upon our hearts” is a matter of will and affect; it is a repair of the madness of the will that is at the heart of sin. Still, it is at least a cognitive matter. In giving us faith, the Holy Spirit enables us to see the truth of the main lines of the Christian gospel as set forth in Scripture. The internal invitation of the Holy Spirit is therefore a source of belief, a cognitive process that produces in us belief in the main lines of the Christian story… if they are held with sufficient firmness, these beliefs qualify as knowledge, just as Calvin’s definition of faith has it.
Warranted Christian Belief, 206
N. T. Wright
The call to ‘believe in the gospel’, or to ‘believe in me’, does not suggest that Jesus was inviting Galilean villagers to embrace a body of doctrine – not even a basic ‘theory’ about ‘salvation’ and how they might attain it… It evokes the historical picature of one who believed that, with his work, Israel’s god was inaugurating his long-awaited kingdom.
Jesus and the Victory of God, 263
Lauren F. Winner
Maybe God has given some people belief like a pier, to stand on (and God has given those people’s steadiness to the church, to me, as a reminder, as an aid), and maybe God has given others something else: maybe God has given to some this humming sense that we know nothing, this belief and disbelief a hundred times an hour, this training in nimbleness.
Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis (HarperOne, 2013)
Lauren F. Winner
To tell someone what you believe may be to answer the wrong question—better to say, instead, what the church believes, better to use the language the church has bequeathed to us to shape our experience of journey to God—for us and for our salvation he came down from Heaven.
Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis (HarperOne, 2013)
James K. A. Smith
Faith is a how and, more specifically, a way of living in light of an event.
Mark Twain (for contrast)
Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.
Following the Equator (1897)
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