Quotes about Relationship

If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.

And just as the child gradually breaks off the habit of regarding his mother only as a means of satisfying his own desires and learns to love her for her own sake, so the worshipper after a struggle has reached an attitude of mind in which he desires God for himself and not as a means of fulfillment of his own wishes.

Left to ourselves we turn God into an object, something we can deal with, some thing we can use to our benefit, whether that thing is a feeling or an idea or an image.

There is nothing more common than for people who want to talk about God to lose interest in the people they are talking to.

The primary practice of language is not in giving out information but being in relationship.

They'll all get to know me firsthand, the little and the big, the small and the great. They'll get to know me by being kindly forgiven, with the slate of their sins forever wiped clean.

Our lives are lived well only when they are lived on the terms of their creation, with God loving and us being loved, with God making and us being made, with God revealing and us understanding, with God commanding and us responding.

Under the image of the Trinity we discover that we do not know God by defining him but by being loved by him and loving in return.

Important in any community of faith is an ever-renewed expectation in what God is doing with our brothers and sisters in the faith. We refuse to label the others as one thing or another. We refuse to predict our brother's behavior, our sister's growth.

If Christians worshipped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship...Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship our deep, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured.

There is no literature in all the world that is more true to life and more honest than Psalms, for here we have warts-and-all religion. Every skeptical thought, every disappointing venture, every pain, every despair that we can face is lived through and integrated into a personal, saving relationship with God—a relationship that also has in it acts of praise, blessing, peace, security, trust and love.

The Christian is a person who recognizes that our real problem is not in achieving freedom but in learning service under a better master. The Christian realizes that every relationship that excludes God becomes oppressive.