If you say: I believed in God, I trusted God and He didn't come through - You only trusted God to meet your agenda.
Interpretation
True faith involves trusting God without expecting Him to fulfill our specific desires.
This quote by Timothy Keller highlights the concept that genuine belief in God transcends mere expectations of Him fulfilling our personal agendas. It suggests that faith should not be conditional upon receiving what we want, but rather a trust in God's greater purpose and wisdom, even when outcomes differ from our desires.
In practice
In a sermon about faith and expectations.
Falling in love in a Christian way is to say,'I am excited about your future and I want to be part of getting you there. I'm signing up for the journey with you. Would you sign up for the journey to my true self with me? It's going to be hard but I want to get there.
Only in Jesus Christ do we see how the untamable, infinite God can become a baby and a loving Savior. On the cross we see how both the love and the holiness of God can be fulfilled at once.
All human problems are ultimately symptoms, and our separation from God is the cause.
While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.
To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
God's Kingdom is "present in its beginnings, but still future in its fullness. This guards us from an under-realized eschatology (expecting no change now) and an over-realized eschatology (expecting all change now). In this stage, we embrace the reality that while we're not yet what we will be, we're also no longer what we used to be.
A low capacity for getting along with those near us often goes hand in hand with a high receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of men.
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there
Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us.
Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.
We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.
I'm always Peter Pan in my heart
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