247 results for tag: Quote for today
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
March 10, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“Bad News Religion offers us a Santa Claus god who will give us what we want if we are good. Instead, authentic Christianity tells us that God gives us what we need because he is good.
With the focus on what we do, paganism tells us that a god or the gods want us to do the best we can, and at the end he (or they) will judge us based upon our performance. Performance-based religion tells us that a Santa Claus god will let us into his heaven if we qualify, if we overcome and if we are good little boys and girls.
By promising us anything and everything Bad News Religion leads us to slavery, but ...
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
March 7, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“Jesus came to lift us out of shame and guilt and fear – not to add to our enormous burdens of self-loathing. He didn’t come to start a new religion or slightly modify and upgrade on what was already in place. He didn’t offer a way in which his followers could live more moral lives by virtue of the character they would build if they faithfully obeyed all the steps he advocated. He didn’t tell his followers to prove their worth to him by climbing the highest mountain and fording every stream because the mountains are higher than our abilities to climb and the rivers deeper and more deadly than our ...
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
March 5, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“In what is certainly one of the great mysteries of God’s love and grace, Jesus, revealing the love and grace of the Father, extended and offered forgiveness instead of retribution and retaliation. Indeed, the mere idea of turning the other cheek appears to most humans to be one of the most ridiculous and illogical teachings of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The knee-jerk response to God’s grace and love is that it is impractical and perhaps even impossible. The immediate response to Jesus’ teaching that we pray for our enemies and stop the endless cycle of returning evil for evil is that ...
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
March 3, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“Years ago I met the gifted and celebrated French author, Dominique LaPierre in his home in Paris. Though he had written many best sellers, I was most interested at the time in his most recent novel, City of Joy (published in 1985), later turned into a movie by the same name. In the movie, City of Joy, actor Patrick Swayze plays a medical student confronted with overwhelming poverty. In the movie, a woman confronts the young medical student with one of three choices: You can run. You can watch. Or you can count on getting involved with compassionate response.”
Originally published in: ...
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
February 29, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“God’s grace is dynamic – it flows. It’s more like a river than it is a lake or a reservoir. God’s grace is not given to be held in trust in a religious safe deposit box. God’s grace is not given so that we may bury it in a napkin and present it to the Lord upon his return, proving to him that we stored it up, saved it and never lost it. God’s grace is given to be given. God’s grace is a free-flowing river – religion endeavors to be a reservoir of good deeds. God’s grace grows as it is used, it is a gift which must be given, not merely to be replenished, but to grow. God’s grace ...
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
February 27, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“Given the prevailing assumption that a little grace is good but too much can be hazardous to your spiritual health, ‘old-fashioned’ holiness preaching often immediately follows a message of grace with a legalistic counterpunch that brings a congregation back to its senses. Such preaching centers on external acts and behaviors that we humans do or don’t do, and, given such an emphasis, is an absolute contradiction to the gospel of Jesus Christ that is based upon faith alone, grace alone, and Christ alone.”
Originally published in:
Bad News Religion
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Reflections Along the Jesus Way
February 25, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“The crowds who greeted Jesus making his triumphal entry into Jerusalem – triumphal in terms of their welcome, in terms of the accolades they heaped on him and the acclaim they gave him – projected their hopes on to Jesus, seeing him as a military savior.
The crowds wanted to see blood – the blood of their oppressors. Jesus gave them blood, but not the blood of those from whom they wanted revenge.”
Originally published in:
Spiritual Soup for the Hungry Soul, Volume 1
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Reflections Along the Jesus Way
February 22, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“While it is a complex book to study, Revelation is a breath of fresh air. Revelation contains no ambiguity, no shades of gray. It is not hamstrung by political correctness. It minces no words in describing sin and evil. Revelation is clear about the evils of performance-based religion. The apocalyptic imagery of Revelation is inked in stark black and white. There is no middle ground. The people described in Revelation are either followers of Antichrist or followers of Christ. If you are not with Christ, you are part of the enemy camp. Revelation calls us out of complacency and our ...
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
February 20, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“Jesus is not only our guide on our journey, but he is the Way – he is the path, he is the road. We are Christ-followers and we are people of the Way because he walked this way before us – he blazed the trail before us – and we follow in his footsteps.
As people of the Way, we follow Jesus and as we journey with our risen Lord, we mature in him. He builds us into his temple – a spiritual house where he dwells. When it comes to church membership, Christ-followers must ask if they first and foremost belong to Jesus or if they think Jesus belongs exclusively to their religious ...
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
February 18, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“In a ‘Dennis the Menace’ cartoon, Dennis and his pal Joey are seen leaving next-door-neighbor Mrs. Wilson’s house loaded up with a plate full of cookies. Joey says to Dennis, ‘I wonder what we did to deserve this?’ The forever-in-trouble, always-in-hot-water Dennis, well aware that he is far from perfect, astutely advises Joey, ‘Look, Joey, Mrs. Wilson didn’t give us these cookies because we’re nice, but because she’s nice.’
The first lesson of grace… is this: We don’t deserve God’s love – God is not obligated to give us cookies because we think we have ...
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
February 15, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“Along with its equally seductive cousin of religious legalism, prediction addiction had been the language of my life, the drum beat of my religious soul. Prediction addiction is an obsession, a compulsion to continually seek exhilarating ‘fulfillments of Bible prophecy’ in current events of the day. In my experience, the bondage of legalism combined with an addiction to prediction addiction gave meaning and order to my world while at the same time being the perfect one-two punch religion needed to control me. Legalism told me what I had to do in order to earn God’s love and the ...
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
February 13, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“Jesus voluntarily allowed himself to be killed rather than to kill. Jesus didn’t seek to intimidate those who would express hatred and violence toward him by arming the disciples with the best weapons available at the time. In Matthew 26:51-52, Jesus told one of his disciples, companions and followers, who drew his sword to prevent the arrest of Jesus: ‘Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.’ Jesus didn’t believe in peace produced by intimidation via a display of force that would cause his enemies to fear doing harm to him. There is no question ...
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
February 11, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“The Beatitudes are descriptive of what Jesus does and will do in the lives of his followers – they are not prescriptions or lesson plans for those who will become blessed because of their own blood, sweat and tears.”
Originally published in:
Beautiful Sayings – Beatitudes of Grace
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Reflections Along the Jesus Way
February 8, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“God’s love says: ‘I know all about you and I still love you anyway.’
God’s love says: ‘I am going to love you forever – you can’t stop me loving you.’
God’s love says: ‘Nothing you can do, positively or negatively, can make me love you more or less than I already do. My love does not depend on what you do or fail to do.’”
Originally published in:
Letters to My Friends
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Reflections Along the Jesus Way
February 6, 2024 - Quote for the Day
“The kingdom of God involves feasting and dancing and laughter. God – God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit – does not absent himself from such merrymakings. God is involved in the wining and the dining – he is the very center of the joke telling, the good-natured jesting, the singing and the offering of toasts. This is his banquet – he plans it, caters it and hosts it. God doesn’t absent himself from the party and sneak off to the library, reading the Bible in the original Greek or Hebrew. God is right there in the middle of the festivities.
The heavenly wedding ...
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
February 4, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“You probably have heard about the God of wrath. But have you heard of God throwing a party? How often have you pictured God as throwing back his head and laughing? Has anyone suggested an image of God celebrating on the dance floor, tripping the light fandango? Is God ever personified as being at the head of a banquet table, drinking and eating way into the night? Those images are very much a part of how the Bible depicts God and his nature. When Jesus describes God’s kingdom of heaven, he often does so by using the imagery of a joyful banquet. In the book of Revelation, we read that ...
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
February 1, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“God did not produce and create this world in all of its intrinsic beauty and intricate complexity because he was bored and needed something to do. We are here – our world is here – because of his love. We and all creation testify to his love. Everything that is – all creatures great and small – all flora and fauna – all the created of this majestic planet earth – exists because of God’s love.”
Originally published in:
Wonders of His Love
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Reflections Along the Jesus Way
January 30, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“Apart from God’s forgiveness, we all feel a sense of condemnation. Shame and guilt result when we fail to measure up to societal, ethical, biblical or family standards. The fact that everyone is imperfect does not help when we experience a major failure. Shame and guilt can be a burden carried and lived with, like a recuring nightmare, for decades. Shame and guilt comprise spiritual swamps that imprison so many. Shame relates to how we feel about ourselves – who we think we are. Guilt relates to our behavior – what we have done. When overwhelmed by guilt, we say, ‘I did something ...
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
January 28, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“According to Jesus, the religious establishment had declared themselves spiritually healthy and assumed they were beyond need of the services of the Great Physician. It happened then, and it still happens today. Jesus did not accept their spiritual self-diagnosis. Jesus declared that the unqualified would be freely admitted to his new church, rather than membership granted on the basis of merit – the prevailing status quo of religious admissions policies. Those who had determined that they were immune from the spiritual disease Jesus came to heal did not respond to him. On the other hand, those who ...
Reflections Along the Jesus Way
January 25, 2024 - Quote for the Day:
“The gospel transforms every dimension of our lives. Paul said it was not appropriate to drag old cultural/religious traditions into the gospel (in this case Jewish religious traditions). Paul insisted, as Jesus said, that we cannot put the new wine of the gospel into the old wineskins of some former belief, some former religion, some former set of teachings.
Jesus said that the new wine of the gospel cannot be enclosed in any religious container. Eventually the gospel, as it grows, will ferment and then explode. The gospel will blow up any religious container that tries to remake ...
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