Quotes about Appropriation

Anxiety can be replaced only by the freedom whose harsh requirements are its cause. Being free requires us to release the brakes that anxiety represents in order to accept and appropriate our proper spiritual fulfillment or perhaps even to recognize, if that is what we in the end believe, that no such prospect is in store.

The greatest defect of the Old Covenant was that it demanded obedience but did not provide the power for it. The new heart delights in the law of God; it is willing and able to obey it. A promise of God is a thing of faith. If you do not believe it, you cannot appropriate it or put it to use.

Each generation has to appropriate its deepest beliefs for itself. We used to say it this way: "God has no grandchildren." Each generation must itself be realigned with God and discover the mystery for itself.

Indeed our survival and liberation depend upon our recognition of the truth when it is spoken and lived by the people. If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth. To know the truth is to appropriate it, for it is not mainly reflection and theory. Truth is divine action entering our lives and creating the human action of liberation.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Even if we were not sinful by nature, the sin of having private property would suffice to condemn us before God; for that which he gives us freely, we appropriate to ourselves.

The way in which we appropriate the benefits of Christ's atoning death is by faith culminating in baptism

No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.