4,834 Quotes About Jesus

[re: 'keeping the commandments'] I believe that "keeping" speaks more about focus than measuring success on a pass-fail basis. When we keep something, we hold it close to our hearts and allow it to progressively become our object of focus. The action of keeping becomes personal and intimate, not regulated by an outside authority. Whatever we keep becomes an object we love and cherish, and it becomes a center point from which the rest of our lives flow--like a compass.

Through a lens of navigation, then, we can see that "keeping" isn't about having a perfect, linear or flawless journey; keeping is about having a focus point that you want to keep moving toward.

When it’s dark, I can’t see my hand in front of my face. Yet, no matter how deep the darkness might be, God sees both. And when I realize that, the dark never really gets that dark.

Hope is not some flimsy belief that things might somehow work out. Rather, hope is a belief in a God who’s already worked it out.

Might it be that I’ve lost everything so that I can recognize the fact that everything had become my everything?

The longer I’ve walked with God the more I’ve realized that being thankful is vigorously celebrating what’s right in the world while anticipating that what’s wrong with it will soon follow suit.

Being alert is not to vigilantly stand on tip-toe in order to scan some distant horizon out of the fear of some approaching enemy. Quite the opposite. It is falling to our knees knowing that God is already out on that horizon and that He thwarted the enemy long before they ever reached it.

The things that Jesus thought, and the things that Jesus did, were not a clean fit for those whose entire focus had been right thinking or right doing; Jesus was, and still it, altogether different and outside all of our camps and categories.

Unlike the bounded-set approach where we're constantly trying to measure ourselves up to see whether we're in or out, the centered-set paradigm invites us to ask far more simple and profound questions: "Am I moving toward Jesus? Am I moving toward love?