The trouble with many men is that they have got just enough religion to make them miserable. If there is not joy in religion, you have got a leak in your religion.
Interpretation
A shallow understanding of religion can lead to unhappiness and dissatisfaction.
Billy Sunday highlights the paradox of religion where a superficial grasp can bring more misery than joy. He suggests that true religion should inspire happiness and fulfillment, and if it does not, there is a fundamental flaw in one's understanding or practice of faith.
In practice
This quote could be used in a sermon to emphasize the importance of finding joy in faith.
Whenever a day comes when I can stand and preach God's Word without an agony of anxiety lest the people will not accept Christ; whenever a day comes when I can see men and women coming down the aisles without joy in my heart, I'll quit preaching.
Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.
The saloon is a liar. It promises good cheer and sends sorrow.
I don't believe there are devils enough in hell to pull a boy out of the arms of a godly mother.
The church is not a dormitory for sleepers, it is an institution for workers; it is not a rest camp, it is a front line trench.
The backslider likes the preaching that wouldn't hit the side of a house, while the real disciple is delighted when the truth brings him to his knees.
A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.
And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost.
If you correct your hidden deeds subsequently, Allaah will correct your outward deeds.
I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.
The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.
A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!
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