Quotes about Answers

Faith minus vulnerability and mystery equals extremism. If you've got all the answers, then don't call what you do 'faith.'

The required cheerfulness that characterizes many of our churches produces a suffocating environment of pat, religious answers to the painful, complex questions that riddle the lives of hurting people.

Sometimes in the shadows of one's self lie the problems, and in the shadows of one's shaping lie the answers.

More than anything else, prayer enables you to see your own heart and brings you into alignment with God's heart. Prayer is not a monologue in which we imagine ourselves to be communing with God. Rather, it is a dialogue through which God fashions your heart and makes his dream of you a reality. It is truly the treasured gift of the Christian that through direct answers and not-so-direct answers, the follower of Jesus begins to love God for who he is, not for what he may get out of him.

intellectual answers to the problem of pain are important. But intellect alone cannot help us navigate the minefield of pain and suffering. Other worldviews may offer intellectual answers. Christianity alone offers us a person.

Apologetics is not just giving answers to questions — it is questioning people's answers, and even questioning their questions. When you question someone's question, you compel him or her to open up about his or her own assumptions. Our assumptions must be examined.

I have little doubt that the single greatest obstacle to the impact of the gospel has not been its inability to provide answers, but the failure on our part to live it out.

The gospel of Jesus Christ was made synonymous with the methods that had devalued the truth, and people began to search elsewhere for answers.

Worship that is properly understood and properly given is co-extensive with life… It informs all of life, everything we do and everything we say and think. At its core it is the sense and service of God. Worship brings into confluence all the questions and answers that we have and do not have.

Christianity does not promise that you will have every question fully answered to your satisfaction before you die, but the answers it gives are consistently consistent.

What is essential is the sense of God's presence during dark seasons of questioning. . . . Our need for specific answers is dissolved in the greater issue of the lordship of Christ over all questions —those that have answers and those that don't.2 A heart

history consists primarily of speaking and being answered, crying and being heard. If that is true, it means there can be no history in the empire because the cries are never heard and the speaking is never answered. And if the task of prophecy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously, and ceasing to look to the numbed and dull empire that never intended to answer in the first place.