Quotes from Pete Greig

God brings his presence 'into the house', and we are called to release it back out into the world or the blessing will die.

The day we start taking credit for the fact that he answers prayer we are in deep, deep trouble.

Jesus is what God sounds like. He's literally the "living Word of God." Hearing his voice is not so much a skill we must master, therefore, as a master we must meet.

God is far too real to be met anywhere other than in reality.

First, we must learn to read the Bible with our heads, in order to understand what is actually, objectively, being said. And second, we must learn to read it with our hearts, in order to experience God's voice through its pages. By carefully studying the Bible, we come to understand what its writers were originally saying. And by prayerfully exploring it, we learn to discern what the Holy Spirit is saying to us now.

God is mobilising an army, but it is a broken army that marches on its knees.

One in five American children are living in poverty, and yet, according to the Barna Research Group, 'half of all adults did nothing at all in the past year to help a poor person' and 'few churches have a serious ministry to the poor.' With such crying needs and such self-absorption among God's people, surely things have never been worse.

If our prayers for others mean anything at all, they cannot be cloistered away all the time in sanitised environments. Standing in the gap for the oppressed may well mean that it matters where we pray and how we pray, and that our prayers for the poor are worked out very practically.

To be a Christian is to live positively and not destructively, to make ugly things beautiful, and to make chaos meaningful.

Augustine once said that God puts salt on our lips that we may thirst for him. Sometimes it's the salt of our tears.

I'd rather be unhappy and know that God is with me, than be happy, comfortable and unsure of God's presence.

I feel like God is waiting to see if I am waiting. If he just flooded in with answers and guidance right now, I would not have changed; I would not have learned to wait and trust without the answers and without a road map for the future. So I'm kind of glad that God was silent, because I actually want to wait; I want to prove my mettle to God. I don't necessarily want ease and instant anything any more.