Christian Reflection Quotes & Sayings

Choose your friends carefully. They are a reflection of you. — Jim George

There are many who occasionally attend church and who are trying experimentally to be Christians, yet are unable to identify well or define accurately the central truths of Christian teaching. The knowledge they have of the Christian tradition may have come chiefly through hymns. Their strong and sincere feelings are not matched with serious biblical or historical reflection on those feelings. Religious feelings are, indeed, crucial to the deeper learning of Christian truth, but they easily become superficial and narcissistic if the mind of Christ is not a mentor to natural religious impulse. The loss of center in Christian education is arguably due to a serious default of pastoral leadership; when the teaching elder does not teach, the effect is felt throughout the entire Christian congregation. — Thomas C. Oden

That love, which is the highest joy, which is divine simplicity itself, is not for you moderns, you children of reflection. It works only evil in you. As soon as you wish to be natural, you becomecommon. To you nature seems something hostile; you have made devils out of the smiling gods of Greece, and out of me a demon. You can only exorcise and curse me, or slay yourselves in bacchantic madness before my altar. And if ever one of you has had the courage to kiss my red mouth, he makes a barefoot pilgrimage to Rome in penitential robes and expects flowers to grow from his withered staff, while under my feet roses, violets, and myrtles spring up every hour, but their fragrance does not agree with you. Stay among your northern fogs and Christian incense; let us pagans remain under the debris, beneath the lava; do not disinter us. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

The greatest prayers that I could ever utter come from the heart. And when I pray that way, I rarely need to open my mouth. Therefore, maybe I should think about talking less. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Your choices and decisions are a reflection of how well you've set and followed your priorities. — Elizabeth George

God's Word transforms you into someone who reflects His glory. — Elizabeth George

The disobedience if Eve in the Genesis story has been used to justify women's inequality and suffering in many Christian traditions. Thus, what is understood as women's complicity in evil leads much traditional theological reflection on suffering to offer the "consequent admonition to 'grin and bear it' because such is the deserved place of women." Similarly, when Jesus is seen as a divine co-sufferer, the potentially liberating narratives of Jesus as a revolutionary leader who takes the side of the poor and dispossessed can be ignored in favor of religious beliefs more interested in Jesus as a stoic victim. Christ's suffering is inverted and used to justify women's continued suffering in systems of injustice by framing it as redemptive. — Melissa V. Harris-Perry

The truth that there is an infinite, eternal, and personal mind behind the realities of the universe that can be detected through human reflection is the most transformative Christian apologetics idea in history. Christianity's explosive explanatory power and scope extends to such human enterprises as philosophy, psychology, science, religion, the arts, history, law, education, labor, economics, and medicine. — Kenneth Samples

When hungry, do not throw yourself upon food - else you will overload your heart and body. Eat slowly, without avidity, with reflection to the glory of God, remembering the God Who feeds us, and above all His incorruptible food, His Body and Blood, that out of love He has given Himself to us in food and drink, remembering also the holy word of the Gospel. — John Of Kronstadt

It is when I am cold, alone, bitterly forlorn and shuttered from all hope that you will see who I truly am. And my goal is that at those most precarious of moments, what you will see is Jesus holding you through my tears. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

To a sinner, a righteous person is an oddity and an abnormality. A Christian's goodness is a rebuke to the wicked; his being right-side up is a reflection upon the worldling's inverted position. — Billy Graham

I, a fervent anti-Christian from early teenage years and a materialist in my heart of hearts, had in one second, without any reflection, got to my feet, walked up the aisle and knelt in front of the altar. It had been pure impulse. And, meeting those glares, I had no defence, I couldn't say I was a Christian. I looked down, slightly ashamed. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Conservatives and liberals understand the Christian faith as a set of ideas because, so understood, Christianity seems to be a set of beliefs assessable to anyone upon reflection. — Stanley Hauerwas

When outsiders claim that we are unchristian, it is a reflection of this jumbled (and predominately negative) set of perceptions. When they see Christians not acting like Jesus, they quickly conclude that the group deserves an unchristian label. Like a corrupted computer file or a bad photocopy, Christianity, they say, is no longer in pure form, and so they reject it. One quarter of outsiders say therefore most perception of Christianity is that the faith has changed for the worse. It has gotten off-track and is not what Christ intended. Modern-day Christianity no longer seems Christian. — David Kinnaman

If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others. — Erich Fromm

Today our children are our reflection. Tomorrow they will be our shadows. — Maralee McKee

You are placed on this earth to represent God. — Jim George

As I walked by his side homeward, I read well in his iron silence all he felt towards me: the disappointment of an austere and despotic nature, which has met resistance where it expected submission - the disapprobation of a cool, inflexible judgment, which has detected in another feelings and views in which it has no power to sympathise: in short, as a man, he would have wished to coerce me into obedience: it was only as a sincere Christian he bore so patiently with my perversity, and allowed so long a space for reflection and repentance. — Charlotte Bronte

Pay no attention to toxic words. What people say is often a reflection of themselves, not you. — Christian Baloga

It's not technology that limits us. We're the limitation. Our technology is an expression of our intelligence and creativity, so the limitations of our technology are a reflection of our own limitations. We can't fundamentally advance technology until we fundamentally advance ourselves. — Christian Cantrell

Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience
a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth. — Lord Acton

Love does not reflect. Love is simple. Love never mistakes. Likewise believe and trust without reflection, for faith and trust are also simple; or better: God, in whom we believe and in whom we trust, is an incomplex Being, as He is also simply love. — John Of Kronstadt

Our attitude is a result of our perception of reality, which is as much a reflection of time as anything else:
what we have encountered in the past,
our present situation,
and how we see the future unfolding.

People of faith can put their past behind them; all has been forgiven.
We can also be buoyed in the present by the realization that all things must pass.
That leaves the greatest source of optimism for the Christian:
the certain future that lies ahead.

Christ has replaced death with immortality. With our souls entrusted to God through faith in our Savior, a glorious future with God is ours.

- Ed McMinn, Daily Devotions for Die-Hard Fans: Oklahoma State Cowboy — Ed McMinn

Remember what you do in life is merely a reflection of who you are as a Christian, one who loves and serves the Lord. — Rachel Hauck

The expression 'to lose one's faith', as one might a purse or a ring of keys, has always seemed to me rather foolish. It must be one of those sayings of bourgeois piety, a legacy of those wretched priests of the eighteenth century who talked so much.

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it. That is why old-fashioned confessors are not far wrong in showing a certain amount of scepticism when dealing with 'intellectual crises', doubtless far more rare than people imagine. An educated man may come by degrees to tuck away his faith in some back corner of his brain, where he can find it again on reflection, by an effort of memory: yet even if he feels a tender regret for what no longer exists and might have been, the term 'faith' would nevertheless be inapplicable to such an abstraction, no more like real faith, to use a very well-worn simile, than the constellation of Cygne is like a swan. — Georges Bernanos

Your attitude toward others, work, and your daily life is a reflection of your attitude toward God. — Elizabeth George

For Christians, as for all people of faith, reflection, meditation and prayer help us to renew ourselves in God's love, as we strive daily to become better people. The Christmas message shows us that this love is for everyone. There is no one beyond its reach. — Queen Elizabeth II

Oh, it's not her Christian name. Her Christian name is Clara.' 'Is it though?' said Mr. Barkis. He seemed to find an immense fund of reflection in this circumstance, and sat pondering and inwardly whistling for some time. 'Well!' he resumed at length. 'Says you, "Peggotty! Barkis is waitin' for a answer." Says she, perhaps, "Answer to what?" Says you, "To what I told you." "What is that?" says she. "Barkis is willin'," says you.' This extremely artful suggestion Mr. Barkis accompanied with a nudge of his elbow that gave me quite a stitch in my — Charles Dickens

Your friends are a reflection of you. — Elizabeth George

The great Christian theologian Rudolf Bultmann liked to say that the quest for the historical Jesus is ultimately an internal quest. Scholars tend to see the Jesus they want to see. Too often they see themselves - their own reflection - in the image of Jesus they have constructed. — Reza Aslan

But their overall effect was to overemphasize immediate personal conversion to Christ instead of a studied period of reflection and conviction; emotional, simple, popular preaching instead of intellectually careful and doctrinally precise sermons; and personal feelings and relationship to Christ instead of a deep grasp of the nature of Christian teaching and ideas. — J.P. Moreland

Fixing our thoughts on Jesus requires time, for true reflection cannot happen with a glance. No one can see the beauty of the country if he hurries through it on the interstate. — R. Kent Hughes

The shift in American society from admiring Christians to fearing and criticizing them provides an opportunity for self-reflection. How have we been presenting the message we believe in? Might there be a more grace-filled way? — Philip Yancey