Quotes about Conviction

I believe that the Bible does not model a faith that depends on certainty for the simple fact that the Bible does not provide that kind of certainty. Rather, in all its messy diversity, the Bible models trust in God that does not rest on whether we are able to be clear and certain about what to believe.

Doubt can certainly leave us empty and frightened, but that is precisely the benefit of doubt: it exposes the folly that strong faith means you need to "know what you believe," that the more faith you "have," the more certain you are.

And it's always a bad move to invent a Jesus who agrees with us rather than challenges us.

Believing is easy. It gives us wiggle room to think our way out of a tight spot. But trust doesn't have any wiggle room. It explodes it. Trust is about being all in.

Faith describes our whole way of looking at life and how we act on that.

A faith that rests on knowing, where you have to "know what you believe" in order to have faith, is disaster upon disaster waiting to happen. It values too highly our mental abilities. All it takes to ruin that kind of faith is a better argument. And there's always a better argument out there somewhere.

We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.

Then Moses answered, “What if they do not believe me or listen to my voice? For they may say, ‘The LORD has not appeared to you.’”

“This is so that they may believe that the LORD, the God of their fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob—has appeared to you.”

And the LORD said, “If they refuse to believe you or heed the witness of the first sign, they may believe that of the second.

So on that day all the troops and all Israel were convinced that the king had no part in the murder of Abner son of Ner.

But the man of God replied, “If you were to give me half your possessions, I still would not go with you, nor would I eat bread or drink water in this place.