Sermon quotes on god
Augustine of Hippo
Because God has made us for Himself, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.
Augustine of Hippo
God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them.
Jerry Bridges
Nothing is too big for Him to handle, and nothing is too small to escape His attention.
G.K. Chesterton
The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
Jim Elliot
God always gives his best to those who leave the choice with him.
Søren Kierkegaard
God is not like a human being; it is not important for God to have visible evidence so that he can see if his cause has been victorious or not; he sees in secret just as well.
Helen Grace Lescheid
Our circumstances are not an accurate reflection of God’s goodness. Whether life is good or bad, God’s goodness, rooted in His character, is the same.
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.
Perry Noble
We should always use our weaknesses to point others to Christ’s strength.
Rick Warren
Teach us, O Lord, the disciplines of patience, for we find that to wait is often harder than to work.
C.S. Lewis
There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.
R.C. Sproul
Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God.
What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics, 2016, p.29.
Francis Chan
Not being able to fully understand God is frustrating, but it is ridiculous for us to think we have the right to limit God to something we are capable of comprehending.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
God travels wonderful ways with human beings, but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people. God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him; rather, his way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof. Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps us away: that is precisely where God loves to be. There he confounds the reason of the reasonable; there he aggravates our nature, our piety—that is where he wants to be, and no one can keep him from it. Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”
Annie Dillard
Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?
Brennan Manning
He [God] has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us. He is the only God man has ever heard of who loves sinners.
Jen Wilkin
God’s goodness is a light that radiates through all his other attributes. It is the reason his omnipotence (possession of all power), omniscience (possession of all knowledge), and sovereignty (possession of all control) are a comfort instead of a terror.
In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character, Crossway.
Jen Pollock Michel
God is the I AM that I AM not the I AM that we wish.
Bruce Demarest
God exists (Ps. 19:1; Rom. 1:19). 2. God is uncreated (Acts 17:24). 3. God is Creator (Acts 14:15). 4. God is Sustainer (Acts 14:16; 17:25). 5. God is universal Lord (Acts 17:24). 6. God is self-sufficient (Acts 17:25). 7. God is transcendent (Acts 17:24). 8. God is immanent (Acts 17:26-27). 9. God is eternal (Ps. 93:2). 10. God is great (Ps. 8:3-4). 11. God is majestic (Ps. 29:4). 12. God is powerful (Ps. 29:4; Rom. 1:20). 13. God is wise (Ps. 104:24). 14. God is good (Acts 14:17). 15. God is righteous (Rom. 1:32). 16. God has a sovereign will (Acts 17:26). 17. God has standards of right and wrong (Rom. 2:15). 18. God should be worshiped (Acts 14:15; 17:23). 19. Man should perform the good (Rom. 2:15). 20. God will judge evil (Rom. 2:15-16).
Baylor University Study
In 2006 Baylor University took a national survey to evaluate how people viewed God. They found that only 23 percent of people viewed him as benevolent or loving, while 32 percent saw the Almighty as authoritarian, 16 percent as critical and 24 percent as distant. Five percent claimed to be atheist.
Julian of Norwich
“In this little thing [a hazelnut] I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God preserves it. But what did I see in it? It is that God is the Creator and the protector and the lover. For until I am substantially united to him, I can never have perfect rest or true happiness, until, that is, I am so attached to him that there can be no created thing between my God and me.”
Revelations of Divine Love, in Devotional Classics, ed. Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith, HarperSanFrancisco.
A.W. Tozer
The man who would know God must give time to Him.
God’s Pursuit of Man, 1950; repr., Chicago: Moody, 2015, 20.
Herman Melville
The reason the mass of men fear God, and at the bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.
Taken from a Letter from Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne (June 1851) in Michael Caputo’s God Seen Through the Eyes of the Greatest Minds, p 138
Adam Clarke
God is the eternal, independent, and self-existing Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is absolute dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only by himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, right, and kind.
John Calvin
We must be sure of the infinite good that is done to us by our Lord Jesus Christ, in order that we may be ravished in love with our God and inflamed with a right affection to obey Him, and keep ourselves strictly in awe of Him.
Adam McHugh
We must put away our convenient notions of God—the one who always agrees with us, the one who always favors our nation or political agenda, the one who feeds us candy and never vegetables.
The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction, InterVarsity Press, 2015.
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.
Source Unknown
Somebody once said that the biggest difference between you and God is that God doesn’t think he’s you.
Taken from John Ortberg, God Is Closer Than You Think (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005).
John Ortberg
God does lead his people on roundabout ways. He does not move hastily. He is never in a hurry. It is one of his most irritating qualities.
Donald Miller
It comforts me to think that if we are created beings the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality that it would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater than reality or it would not be reasonable.
Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
Alexander Maclaren
The fire that burns and does not burn out, which has no tendency to destruction in its very energy, and is not consumed by its own activity, is surely a symbol of the One Being, whose being derives its law and its source from itself, who only can say — “I am that I am” — the law of his nature, the foundation of his being, the only conditions of his existence being, as it were, enclosed within the limits of his own nature. You and I have to say, “I am that which I have become,” or “I am that which I was born,” or “I am that which circumstances have made me.” He said, “ I am that I am.” All other creatures are links; this is the staple from which they all hang. All other being is derived, and therefore limited and changeful; this being is un-derived, absolute, self-dependent, and therefore unalterable forevermore.
Quoted in Expositions on Holy Scriptures, Exodus 3.
Kevin DeYoung
At the heart of the postmodern skepticism about knowing God is an inferior conception of what God is like.
Anne Lamott
You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Anchor, 2019)
Thomas Merton
Contemplation reaches out to the knowledge and even to the experience of the transcendent and inexpressible God. It knows God by seeming to touch Him. Or rather it knows Him as if it had been invisibly touched by Him…. Touched by Him Who has no hands, but Who is pure Reality and the source of all that is real! Hence contemplation is a sudden gift of awareness, an awakening to the Real within all that is real. A vivid awareness of infinite Being at the roots of our own limited being. An awareness of our contingent reality as received, as a present from God, as a free gift of love. This is the existential contact of which we speak when we use the metaphor of being “touched by God.”
Thomas Merton
Hence contemplation does not simply “find” a clear idea of God and confine Him within the limits of that idea, and hold Him there as a prisoner to Whom it can always return. On the contrary, contemplation is carried away by Him into His own realm, His own mystery and His own freedom. It is a pure and a virginal knowledge, poor in concepts, poorer still in reasoning, but able, by its very poverty and purity, to follow the Word “wherever He may go.”
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