My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ. Christ teaches that God is love.

Joy is prayer; joy is strength: joy is love; joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.

God doesn’t love me any more or less because I had some work done on my face. You know, I prayed about it a long, long, long, long, long time, because there again, I wouldn’t want to do anything that I felt was going to be offensive to God.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

I spent most of the early years of my walk with God focused on what was wrong with me. Most of us probably do that, hoping to change ourselves.

If we had more hell in the pulpit, we would have less hell in the pew.

We’re all put on this earth to walk in His image, the Master.

Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone… Bad food is fake food… food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives.

I just think that it’s strong and it’s important that we recognize what the Christmas season is about; it’s about the birth of our Savior, and there’s a lot of pressure today to be politically correct, but people are realizing, too, that you have to be open to express your faith what you want believe.

The major religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they deny somehow that God has a feminine face. However, if you go to the holy texts, you see there is this feminine presence.

No, we don’t own our children. Our parental privilege is to love them, to lead them, and to let them go.

God is the name people give to the reason we are here. But I think that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom one can have a personal relationship. An impersonal God.

Christ comes as a thief in the night, & it is not for us to know the times & seasons which God hath put into his own breast.

It sounds simple telling people to work hard and never quit, but to really execute and demonstrate those principles takes discipline and faith. Those are the two factors that I believe separate the good from the great, the successes from the failures.

My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

They died hard, those savage men – like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stunk. And I loved them.

God never promised us a trouble-free life.

Hate has no place in the house of God.

When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.

A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.

Justice that love gives is a surrender, justice that law gives is a punishment.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.

We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers – a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.

I am an angel. I was sent here from God to heal.

I believe God gives you the grace to do what you need to do.

I separated from the Southern Baptists when they adopted the discriminatory attitude towards women, because I believe what Paul taught in Galatians that there is no distinction in God’s eyes between men and women, slaves and masters, Jews and non-Jews – everybody is created equally in the eyes of God.

The only thing that matters is submitting to the will of God.

God, as Truth, has been for me a treasure beyond price. May He be so to every one of us.

Only the really plain people know about love – the very fascinating ones try so hard to create an impression that they soon exhaust their talents.

Our faith is released as we say, pray and do the Word.

The most powerful idea that’s entered the world in the last few thousand years – the idea of grace – is the reason I would like to be a Christian.

I’m not the judge. You know, God didn’t tell me to go around judging everybody.

We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

Unless we place our religion and our treasure in the same thing, religion will always be sacrificed.

God is not upset that Gandhi was not a Christian, because God is not a Christian! All of God’s children and their different faiths help us to realize the immensity of God.

Non-violence is the article of faith.

Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that’s their gift.

Glory be and praise to God. I didn’t do any of this. God did. I don’t have a recipe or a blueprint. I prayed for it, and my prayers are continuing to be answered.

I dote on his very absence.

I was being trained because I wanted to be a preacher like my father. I wanted to talk about Moses; I wanted to talk about God… I wanted to talk about the apostles, the disciples and all that.

My wife has about everything I can think of.

Great loves too must be endured.

Only God can look at somebody’s heart.

Until you pray, God cannot work.

The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.

Why is it that although it takes us years to get into our messes, we expect God to get us out of them in a few days?

I think that God gives you your own will and choices. I don’t believe that we’re supposed to drag ourselves through life defeated and not see God’s blessings. But you have to make the right choices and follow that still, small voice within you. Because I think that’s how God leads us.

There’s a big difference between falling in love with someone and falling in love with someone and getting married. Usually, after you get married, you fall in love with the person even more.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.

I’ve been saying for a couple of years now that people need to let God out of the Sunday morning box, that He doesn’t want to just be with you for an hour or two on Sunday morning and then put back in His box to sit there until you have an emergency, but He wants to invade your Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Our God is a forgiving God.

The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.

Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.

I believe that Jesus realized his oneness with God and he showed, what he attempted to do was show the way to all of us, how to realize our own onenes with God also, so he’s a precursor.