personal faith journey Quotes

I do know plenty of atheists, agnostics and skeptics who have become Christians through the years. In fact, several of my friends were once strong atheists but are now committed followers of Jesus.

The issue of faith is not so much whether we believe in God, but whether we believe the God we believe in. (p.35)

Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship with God through Christ.

We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become 'self feeders.' We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.

I have great assurance when I study my own conversion, when I discuss it with other men, when I look over the 25 years of my pilgrimmage with Christ; I have great assurance of having come to know Him. But even now, if I were to depart from the faith and walk away and keep going in that direction into heresy and worldiness, it could be the greatest of proofs that I never knew Him, that the whole thing was a work of the flesh.

Surely, conversion is a matter between man and his Maker who alone knows His creatures' hearts.

The development of faith in the Lord is an individual matter. Repentance is also an individual matter. Only as an individual can one be baptized and receive the Holy Ghost. Each of us is born individually; likewise, each of us is "born again" individually. Salvation is an individual matter.

Fredrick Buechner kind of loosened up my clerical collar, you might say.

I was kind of feeling a spiritual need all those years. My wife Geraldine and I went to an Episcopalian Church for a while. Oh, it just seemed very political to me that a guy so liberal was talking about opposing the war in Vietnam and I didn't want to hear that when I went to church. I wanted something spiritual.

I am somebody who - my path to my faith is very kind of individual, and I don't want to be lumped into the category of those Westboro Baptists.

Religion is organized, and spirituality is what the individual feels in his relationship with truth and with God. And although spirituality may be expressed in a religion, many people are spiritual and never go to church. They aren't religious in the sense that they practice a certain type of discipline.