Those of us who follow Jesus Christ must seriously commit to praying for our leaders, never forgetting that even our greatest heroes are flawed individuals who need Jesus Christ, just like the rest of us.
I just thought, there are very few stories involving me, Anna Nicole Smith, and Jesus.
The greatest joy of my is when Jesus moves on my heart and tells me to give to someone.
Before I met Jesus I wanted to be a professional pool player.
Apart from Jesus I am a greedy man.
Apart from Jesus Christ you are spiritually bankrupt.
Jesus Christ was the ultimate influencer. My life has been influenced by Jesus more than anyone else.
You're never more like Jesus than when you're giving.
Jews and Muslims who don't accept Jesus will burn in hell.
Forgiveness is constructed in the DNA of the persecuted. One Egyptian pastor this spring delivered a sermon titled, "A Message to Those Who Kill Us." In it he quoted Jesus, declaring the fact that the church would refuse to hate the terrorists, but would instead forgive them, pray for them, and love them. This is one of the reasons why so many terrorists are coming to Jesus.
When a terrorist or a government official demands that you deny Jesus, they're demanding you exchange your belief in him for something else. In America, we don't need a terrorist or autocrat to make any such demands. We do it to ourselves all the time with whatever we value above Jesus; whatever pseudo god we put our faith in.
[A]s a commencement the Lord appeared unto Joseph Smith, both the Father and the Son, the Father pointing to the Son said, "this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased, hear ye him" Here then, was a communication from the heavens made known unto man on the earth, and he at that time came into possession of a fact that no man knew in the world but he, and that is that God lived, for he had seen him, and that his Son Jesus Christ lived, for he also had seen him.
So close was Christ's connection with God that he equated a man's attitude to himself with the man's attitude to God.
So, because in no other person but Jesus of Nazareth did God first become human (in his birth), then bear our sins (in his death), then conquer death (in his resurrection) and then enter his people (by his Spirit), he is uniquely able to save sinners. Nobody else has his qualifications.
The Jesus experience expanded people into a position where they didn't have to have defensive tribal lives, "God loves my people, my tribe, anddoesn't like yours." The Bible is full of such references.
Apologetic explanations do not develop unless there is a reality that has to be explained and defended. Jesus was undeniably a figure of history.
I'd like to turn the whole Jesus story around and look at it from a different vantage point, to consider that he was a human being who achieved such promise of humanity that he entered into what I think God is: mainly, the power of life, the power of love and what Paul Tillich, a German theologian of the mid-twentieth century, called "the ground of all being."
The primary message of the Christian Church is that we were born in sin and we need to be rescued; we cannot rescue ourselves, so God comes to our rescue, pays the price of our sin and transforms us through the death of Jesus.
That's why the virgin birth never gets rid of the human mother. The story only gets rid of the human father. So Jesus' life was the life of God nurtured through the Virgin Mary. That's because the virgin birth died as a literal story as soon as we discovered that women had an egg cell. It's interesting to watch what the Roman church did about that.
I think Jesus is a fact of history. I think a man named Jesus of Nazareth lived and was crucified. I think his death interpreted his life in a fantastic way, because if you study that life carefully underneath an overlay of theology and mythology, you'll find that the power of that life was that he was constantly giving himself away. He was constantly calling people to be all that they could be.
I think I can tell you how I experience God. I experience God as the power of life calling me to live, I experience God as the power of love calling me to love. That's the God I see in Jesus of Nazareth, that's the God I see in the fourth gospel.
The time has come for us to think of Christianity in a different way. Instead of thinking of God entering human life from outside in the person of Jesus, we have to begin to see human life evolving to the place where it opens itself into an experience of divinity.
Catholics don't scream about Jesus, they scream about the bishop.
Jesus prescribes a doctrinal test for false prophets because a behavioral test is unreliable.
While Jesus was at Jerusalem there came a voice from heaven. For what purpose was the voice sent? For the sake of those who stood by. "Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes" (John xii, 30). Of what benefit was the voice when those who heard it were unable to distinguish it from thunder? "The people therefore, that stood by and heard it, said that it thundered" (29).
