Quotes about Experience

Stories are a basic constituent of human life; they are, in fact, one key element within the total construction of a worldview. I

Our present experience, even our present Christian experience, is incomplete. But in Christ we have heard the complete tune; we know now what it sounds like and that we shall one day sing it in tune with him. Our present experience, with all its incompleteness, is meant to point us to the fact that we will one day wake up and arise from sleep. That, after all, is what resurrection is all about. It

An over-authoritarian church, paying no attention to experience, solves the problem by paving the garden with concrete. An over-experiential church solves the (real or imagined) problem of concrete (rigid and "judgmental" forms of faith) by letting anything and everything grow unchecked, sometimes labeling concrete as "law" and so celebrating any and every weed as "grace.

God and his love, and of multiple layers of human folly, which rings true at all kinds of levels of human knowledge and experience.

Anyone who supposes that, because a church has officially renounced some doctrine, nobody thereafter will hold to it, has little experience of real church life.

Beauty, like justice, slips through our fingers. We photograph the sunset, but all we get is the memory of the moment, not the moment itself. We buy the recording, but the symphony says something different when we listen to it at home.

When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves--that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.

The older we get, the bigger the catalog of failures Satan can throw in our faces. You may think, 'I don't have anything to offer.' But you can teach out of your failures as well as your successes (p. 223).

Anything we must assume in order to function in the world is part of general revelation. The undeniable facts of experience reflect the created structure of physical nature or human nature, or both.

Of course you cannot know a man completely, his character, his principles, sense of judgement, not till he's shown his colors, run the people, making laws. Experience, there's the test.

A philosopher once noted that something is odd if a person is not liberal when he is young and conservative when he is old.

I appreciate and enjoy my age.