Quotes about Relationship

Modern covenant research, however, showed me something entirely different. An ancient covenant was more than a contract. It was the means by which two unrelated parties struck a family bond. They became siblings, spouses, or parent and child. Marriage was a covenant; adoption was a covenant. With His covenant, then, God was not just laying down a law. He was raising up a family. The inevitable consequence of covenant is divine filiation.

God has loved us first, and he has made us for himself. He "desires" our love, and so he leaves us free, for true love cannot be coerced.

In Genesis, it says that it is not good for a man to be alone but sometimes it is a great relief.

We don't want to merely obey God: we need to catch His heart. It is then we will glimpse the wisdom behind His directives, and not just see them as laws.

There would be no communion between him and us if he did not first come to us with his grace.

We unlearn the art of speaking well when we cease to speak with God.

When God descends to us he, in a certain sense, abases himself and stammers with us, so He allows us to stammer with Him.

God, in so speaking, lisps with us as nurses are wont to do with little children.

God very commonly takes on the character of a husband to us. Indeed, the union by which he binds us to himself when he receives us into the bosom of the church is like sacred wedlock.

By these words it is plain he does not make love the cause of forgiveness, but the proof of it.

When God opens his mouth to us, he should not find our hearts closed and shut firmly against him.

And we must so discuss them as to bear in mind that this is the main hinge on which religion turns, so that we devote the greater attention and care to it. For unless you first of all grasp what your relationship to God is, and the nature of his judgment concerning you, you have neither a foundation on which to establish your salvation nor one on which to build piety toward God. But the need to know this will better appear from the knowledge itself.