Quotes & Sayings About Encountering God

God didn't let Job suffer because he lacked love, but because he did love, in order to bring Job to the point of encountering God face to face, which is humanity's supreme happiness. Job's suffering hollowed out a big space in him so that God and joy could fill it. — Lee Strobel

For encountering God means encountering transcendent security and transcendent eternity. — Paul Tillich

How can we call ourselves a church and not believe in healing and in miracles? I cannot read four pages anywhere in the Bible without encountering miracles! And the God of the bible is the same today! — T.L. Osborn

When Job lifted his face to the Storm, when he asked and was answered, he learned that he was very small. He learned that his life was a story. He spoke with the Author, and learned that the genre had not been an accident. God tells stories that make Sunday school teachers sweat and mothers write their children permission slips excusing them from encountering reality. — N.D. Wilson

The church has long used the concept of sacraments
outward signs of inward grace
to name the spaces where God meets us in an especially present way. For many Christians, however, that language seems abstract, even (sadly) foreign. Dean Nelson lovingly explores those spaces of encountering God; his luminous book has helped me see anew the sacred in the ordinary. I am grateful. — Lauren F. Winner

Rationale still remains the greatest impediment to encountering God's mysteries. — Christian Hunt

I was born into a world full of 'specialists'. I'm not sure whether it's the result of our education system or just natural entropy, but it's very uncommon to know a poet with even a mediocre knowledge about art, or an artist with a good taste in poetry, and so on and on. What this really is: lack of general education in a structural sense: god knows how many people I've met that are actually PROUD about proclaiming their ignorance about another field: it is as if it signifies their 'devotion to one path' while in reality they really only look like a buffoon if you ask me. New is that I am encountering 'Literary Critics' that proudly proclaim to 'never have read any foreign poetry' as if a 'movie critic' that only has watched Dutch films would be somehow capable of criticizing them in any true sense of the word. — Martijn Benders

Just having an awareness of God's mercy and compassion for us is a great motivation for us to be merciful and compassionate to other people and to take steps toward encountering God. — Jonathan Morris

The all of God, the totality of His immensity, is known in the human heart through encountering divine mercy. The search for the Lord within is the effort to find those places in the substance of the soul where God's mercy and human misery touch each other, where one has bearing on the other. — Anthony Lilles

- What were you thinking about, child?
- I was thinking of heaven.
- It's unnecessary for you to think of heaven: there's already enough to consider about earth. Are you tired of living, you who have barely been born?
- No, but everyone prefers heaven to earth.
- Well, not I. For since heaven, as well as earth, has been made by God, you may count on encountering up there the very same evils as here below. After your death, you will not be rewarded according to your deserts, for if injustices are done you on this earth (as you will find out later by experience) there is no reason why, in the next life, you will not be further wronged. The best thing for you to do is not think of God, and since it is refused you, to make your own justice. — Comte De Lautreamont

Human beings seek to experience reunion with God by encountering God in relationship to one another. We can speak of the persons who so reveal God to us as our soul mates. Every soul knows the qualities of its soul mates, because every soul knows the qualities of God that it feels separated from. God has placed the knowledge of the soul mates in our intuition. — Joe Perez

God longs to listen to our sad songs. He wants to hear our hearts cry out to him, even when we don't understand his plan or are missing the lessons he wants to teach us. He loves to listen to our needs, and it's all right to tell him, Yes, Lord, I'm overwhelmed. Help me, Jesus, please. Do you even remember me? Because all these situations I'm encountering are killing me. I need you, Jesus. When we arrive at this point, we're in a good place. — Rachel Wojo

Scripture is not a concept; scripture is a person (John 1:1,14). When you stand before the Word of God, you are not merely encountering a concept; you are standing face-to-face with God. — Henry Blackaby

The journey God has set before us isn't a freeway; we are constantly encountering forks and junctions and crossroads. Which way will we go when we meet them? Life is filled with decisions, and we can't avoid them. — Billy Graham

Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance. — Mark Helprin