“There is a passion and drive for cruel deeds which only the awe and fear of God can soothe; there is a suffocating selfishness in man which only holiness can ventilate.”

“To think of God man must hear the world. Man is not alone in celebrating God. To praise Him is to join all things in their song to Him. Our kinship with nature is a kinship of praise. All beings praise God. Wi live in a community of praise.”

“The ultimate is not a law but a judge, not a power but a father.”

“The structures of the church reflect and embody the kingdom but are neither the kingdom nor the church itself.”

“Thiding unfortunately focuses our attention on how much we give rather than on how much we keep.”

“God is not against us for our mistakes but for us against our mistakes.”

“Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen.”

“Es wird heute eher zu viel als zu wenig über die Kirche geredet. Es gibt etwas Besseres: Lassen Sie uns Kirche s e i n !”

“Denn die Bereitschaft zum Leiden und die Lust an der Sünde schliessen sich aus; wo das eine Begehren ist, hat das andere nicht mehr Platz, nach Grösse, nach all dem, was uns erhebt; das Leiden dagegen durchkreuzt unser eigensüchtiges Begehren.”

“Our culture is doing to sex what people who chew with their mouths open do to food.”

“God’s judgment is giving the sinners their own way.”

“Unsere Meinung zählt so viel wie noch nie – als Durchschnittswert.”

“Habe dein Schicksal lieb, denn es ist der Weg Gottes mit deiner Seele.”

“So ist die Verzweiflung, diese Krankheit im Selbst, die Krankheit zum Tode … Der Tod ist nicht das letzte der Krankheit, aber der Tod ist in einemfort das letzte. Von dieser Krankheit durch den Tod erlöst zu werden ist eine Unmöglichkeit, denn die Krankheit und ihre Qual – und der Tod bestehen gerade darin, nicht sterben zu können.”

“Dass Gott uns gnädig ist, das ist es, was das Bekenntnis vom Vater, Sohn und Heiligen Geist sagt. Das schliesst in sich, dass wir es nicht von uns aus schaffen können, geschafft haben und schaffen werden, mit ihm zusammen zu sein, dass wir es nicht verdient haben, dass er unser Gott ist, dass wir keine Verfügung und kein Anrecht auf ihn haben, dass er aber in ungeschuldeter Güte, in der Freiheit seiner Majestät von sich aus des Menschen Gott, unser Gott sein wollte.”

“To say that someone deserves grace is a contradiction in terms. You can no more deserve grace than you can plan your own surprise party.”

“I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

“Three little Words (in descending Order of importance): I love you”

” ‘ The first rule of business,’ he said, chuckling at my naïveté, ‘is never sell something you love. Otherwise, you may as well be selling your children.’ “

” ‘Before, this man had a job and a hobby. Now suddenly, he’s just got the job, but no hobby anymore. But a man needs both, you see. And now what does this man, who’s always had a hobby, do with his time?’
My friend held up his glass.
‘Answer: Drink.’ “

“It turns out the droplet of our knowledge is a bit lost in the ocean of our unknowing.”

“We can hold on to our intellectual belief in an empty Bench and yet live as if our choices are meaningful and as if there is a difference between love and cruelty. Why would we do that?”

“If there is no God, then there is no way to say any one action is ‘moral’ and another ‘immoral’ but only ‘I like this.’”

“Eine Nation sollte nicht danach beurteilt werden, wie sie ihre höchsten Bürger behandelt, sondern ihre niedrigsten …”

“Ein Mann wird nicht Freiheitskämpfer in der Hoffnung, Auszeichnungen zu bekommen, doch als mir mitgeteilt wurde, ich hätte gemeinsam mit Mr. de Klerk den Friedensnobelpreis 1993 erhalten, war ich tief bewegt.”

“Zunächst einmal … werde kein Freiheitskämpfer mit einiger Selbstachtung Befehle von der Regierung entgegennehmen, gegen die er kämpfe, oder einen langjährigen Verbündeten über Bord werfen, um einem Gegner zu gefallen.”

“Ein Freiheitskämpfer muss jede Gelegenheit wahrnehmen, um den Menschen seine Sache nahezubringen.”

“Um wirklich auf etwas vorbereitet zu sein, muss man es tatsächlich erwarten. Man kann sich nicht auf etwas vorbereiten, während man insgeheim glaubt, es werde nicht geschehen.”

“Der kleinste gemeinsame Nenner von Lebensauffassungen in unserer Gesellschaft ist die Gestaltungsidee eines schönen, interessanten, subjektiv als lohnend empfundenen Lebens.”

“… with the teaching and with music and everything that we do here … our goal is to create a space where each of us swears that the spirit was talking to us. … it’s creating the kind of space, where the resurrected Jesus through the spirit of God can speak to each of us, what it is that we needed to hear.”

“Secularists need to recognize that the enemy that ‘poisons everything’ is not religion but the union of religion and power – and believers need to recognize that religion flourishes best where it operates in a world of free choice…”

“Heaven and hell are about who you know, not about what you do. Who you know saves you from what you did and what you are inside.”

“… God meets me in the strangest places where I don’t expect him to talk to me. Even when I don’t make it a priortity to meet God, it’s his to meet me …”

“… liberation and more importantly all the work that comes after liberation. It’s not an event. It’s a process. Its about helping people to build lifes of dignity, stability, economic atonomy, citizenship…”

“There are only two things that matter in pastoral ministry — teaching the Bible and loving people.”

“But then it hit me … he was saying I would never talk to my neighbor the way I talk to myself and that somehow I come to believe it was wrong to kick other people around but it was okay to do it to myself.”

“Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the pontential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.”

“A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it is the basic structure of a good story.”

“If you’re busy, fried and a wreck, who wants your gospel?”

“YWJ: What drives you, inspires you in the work you do as a pastor, father, writer?

RB: I stumbled into a life that I find really joyful. I’ve always been compelled by Jesus. I’ve always found Jesus fascinating. Everybody has a rule of life. I just find in the Resurrected Christ an order and a rule of life that is worth dying for. I pray a lot, rest a lot and read a lot.”

“Gott und Welt, Gott und die Güter sind widereinander, weil Welt und Güter nach unserem Herzen greifen und erst, indem sie das Herz gewonnen haben, sind, was sie sind. Ohne unser Herz sind Güter und Welt nichts. Sie leben von unserem Herzen. So sind sie wider Gott.”

“… one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship worship rahter than worship God.”

“Wo es Toleranz gibt, gibt es keine Freiheit”

“A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living.”

“… if moses always looked for God in the bushes he would have never climbed the mountain.”

“I am my own affliction
I am my own disease
There ain´t no drug that they could sell
Ah there ain´t no drugs to make me well

…

I made a mess of me I wanna get back the rest of me
I´ve made a mess of me I wanna spend the rest of my life alive
I´ve made a mess of me I wanna reverse this tragedy
I´ve made a mess of me I wanna spend the rest of my live alive
The rest of my life alive!”

“If you don’t believe it with every ounce of you, then there is no point singing it.”

“When the focus turns to Christ, it’s because a showman gets our attention first. We don’t find God in each other. The Body of Christ has an enormous head atop a weak, flabby body.”

“The early Christians learned and grew through relationship. It’s plastered all over the New Testament. Yet, we still structure our religion around one guy, and it’s not Jesus.”

“Lieben heisst verletzlich sein. Liebe irgend etwas, und es wird dir bestimmt zu Herzen gehen oder gar das Herz brechen. Wenn du ganz sicher sein willst, daß deinem Herzen nichts zustößt, dann darfst du es nie verschenken, nicht einmal an ein Tier. Umgib es sorgfältig mit Hobbies und kleinen Genüssen; meide alle Verwicklungen; verschließ es sicher im Schrein oder Sarg deiner Selbstsucht. Aber in diesem Schrein – sicher, dunkel, reglos, luftlos – verändert es sich. es bricht nicht; es wird unzerbrechlich, undurchdringlich, unerlösbar. Die Alternative zum Leiden, oder wenigstens zum Wagnis des Leidens, ist die Verdammung. Es gibt nur einen Ort außer dem Himmel, wo wir vor allen Gefahren und Wirrungen der Liebe vollkommen sicher sind: die Hölle.”

“If our minds can’t plumb the depths of the universe for good answers to suffering, well, then, there can’t be any! This is blind faith of a high order.”

“The Biblical view of things is resurrection – not a future that is just a consolation for the life we never had but a restoration of the life you always wanted.”

“How could you possibly know that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior, comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed that none of the religions have?”

“You can’t say: “All claims about religions are historically conditioned except the one I am making right now.” If you insist that no one can determine which beliefs are right and wrong, why should we believe what you are saying?”

“It is no more narrow to claim that one religion is right than to claim that one way to think about all religions (namely that all are equal) is right. We are all exclusice in our beliefs about religion, but in different ways.”

“Man, whether the neo-atheists like it or not, is a theotropic beast: given the option, he is inclined to believe in a God, not least because, as studies show, religion can increase his well-being in material as well as spiritual ways.”

“The gostpel is therefore not just the ABCs of the Christian life, but the A to Z of the Christian life.”

“It isn’t that God basically wants to condemn and then finds a way to rescue some from that disaster. It is that God longs to bless, to bless lavishly, and so to rescue and bless those in danger of tragedy – and therefore must curse everything that thwarts and destroys the blessing of his world and his people.”

“But start with exegesis, and remind yourself that the end in view is not a tidy system, sitting in hard covers on a shelf where one may look up ‘correct answers,’ but the sermon … or indeed the life of witness to the love of God, through all of which the church is built up and energized for mission, the Christian is challenged, transformed and nurtured in the faith, and the unbeliever is confronted with the shocking but joyful news that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. That is letting Scripture be Scripture.”

“Spirituality is that dimension of living in which we are aware of God’s presence…. God, the Holy One of Being, is more than everywhere; God is the bosom in which creation happens day after day, the ground and the source of everything that exists, the very Place of Being itself. And to be awake and present “in this place” is to encounter God.”

” I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system.

However there are moments when I affirm that resurrection, few and far between as they are. I affirm it when I stand up for those who are forced to live on their knees, when I speak for those who have had their tongues torn out, when I cry for those who have no more tears left to shed.”

“A sermon, then, is never surprised when grace, beauty, meaning, order, compassion, truth and love show up in all sorts of unexpected people and places because it always has been God’s world, it is God’s world, and it always will be God’s world.”

“A sermon, then, brings hope rooted not in escape but engagement, not in evacuation but reclamation, not in leaving but in staying and overcoming.”

“A sermon, then, is about helping people see creation with their own eyes.”

“A sermon, then, is the continuing insistence that through the resurrection of Jesus a whole new world is bursting forth right here in the midst of this one and everybody everywhere can be part of it.”

“A sermon creates a picture, a space, an image, an experience, an encounter, a world, a place that allows people to find themselves in it.”

“When the goal of a church is to get people into church services and then teach them how to invite people to come to church services, so that they in turn will bring others to more church services -

that’s attendance at church services.

And chruch is not ultimately about attending large gatherings.

Church is people.

People who live a certain way in the world.

People who have authority in the world, but authority that comes from breaking themselves open and pouring themselves out so that the world will be healed.”

“People who previously had nothing in common discover that the only thing they now have in common is the one thing that matters.”

“If we fail to recognize that the term ‘God’ always falls short of that toward which the word is supposed to point, we will end up bowing down before our own conceptual creations forged from the raw materials of our self-image, rather than bowing before the one who stands over and above that creation.”

“God is the one subject of whom we must never stop speaking.”

“Wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber sollte man schweigen.”

“Fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do.”

“Christianity is fundamentally a communication event.”

“Heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world.”

“du wurdest darauf angesetzt, den Himmel um die Erde zu erweitern”

“Der Mensch hinkt zu Gott aber rennt zum Teufel.”

„Die Größe eines Menschen hängt einzig und allein von der Stärke des Gottesverhältnisses in ihm ab.“

„Hätte Gott all die dummen Gebete erhört, die ich mein Lebtag an ihn gerichtet habe, wo wäre ich jetzt?“

„Es ist eines Christen unwürdig, nur die Fragen zu stellen, von denen er schon weiß, wie die Antwort lautet.“

“I believe in the resurrection because I want to leap, and I want to trust, and I want to continue to jump on the biggest, widest, most beautiful worldview I can possibly find and I can find nothing that makes my soul soar more than the resurrection.”