Nearness Of God Quotes & Sayings

Nearness to God is common to us all,
Because we're all created and sustained by God,
But only the authentically noble
Possess and live that nearness
That's a constant upswelling passion of love. — Rumi

Thou goest home this night to thy home of winter, To thy home of autumn, of spring, and of summer; Thou goest home this night to thy perpetual home, To thine eternal bed, to thine eternal slumber. Sleep thou, sleep, and away with thy sorrow, Sleep thou, sleep, and away with thy sorrow, Sleep thou, sleep, and away with thy sorrow, Sleep, thou beloved, in the Rock of the fold. The shade of death lies upon thy face, beloved, But the Jesus of grace has His hand round about thee; In nearness to the Trinity farewell to thy pains, Christ stands before thee and peace is in His mind. Jenny, Ian, Fergus, and Marsali joined in, murmuring the final verse with him. Sleep, O sleep in the calm of all calm, Sleep, O sleep in the guidance of guidance, Sleep, O sleep in the love of all loves, Sleep, O beloved, in the Lord of life, Sleep, O beloved, in the God of life! — Diana Gabaldon

Thus his belief was that in a service where feeling could be restrained it ought to be restrained. The power of God was more likely to be known in a solemn stillness than amid noise and excitement. Silence and an expectant seriousness, born of a realisation of the nearness of God, were striking characteristics of the services at Sandfields. — Iain H. Murray

St. Thomas adopts a division of the nine choirs into three groups, according to their intellectual perfection and consequent nearness in being to God - Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominations, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, Angels. Other writers suggest different arrangements; and there is a mass of magnificent theological speculation as to the difference of function between one choir and another. But the Church has defined nothing upon this matter. — Frank Sheed

Is America a land of God where saints abide for ever? Where golden fields spread fair and broad, where flows the crystal river? Certainly not flush with saints, and a good thing, too, for the saints sent buzzing into man's ken now are but poor-mouthed ecclesiastical film stars and clich?-shouting publicity agents. Their little knowledge bringing them nearer to their ignorance, ignorance bringing them nearer to death, but nearness to death no nearer to God. — Sean O'Casey

Lay claim to the nearness of God. "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you" (Heb. 13.5 NIV). — Max Lucado

The greatest nearness of the last god eventuates when the event, as the hesitant self-withholding, is elevated into refusal. The latter is essentially other than sheer absence. Refusal, as belonging to the event, can be experienced only on the basis of the more originary essence of beyng as lit up in the thinking — Martin Heidegger

Artists are interpreters for us of richness and meaning. Artists can reinforce a healthy sense of God's grandeur and nearness. — Sandra Bowden

If you knew what a sensation of the nearness of a higher power one instinctively feels when one is permitted to contribute to the good of mankind, as I have done, and still do! Believe me, it is a great gift of God's mercy! — Jenny Lind

If union means anything, it means that the Christian life is to be a life that is lived with the conscious nearness of the Lord in our lives through the Spirit. God is not remote, like some distant Gnostic or deistic deity, and neither is he immanent in the world around us, for that would depersonalize him. He is transcendent, which means that he stands above us but not far above us. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament both affirm that God is above, as Lord, but that he is accessible. He is above, for us! And he wishes us to come to him, above us, and to fellowship with him. — Terry L. Wilder

God desires that man should be. God does not wish to be alone. The meaning of existence is the conquest of loneliness, the acquisition of kinship and nearness. — Nikolai A. Berdyaev

It is a time for quietness and prayer. Death is present with us every day of our lives, it behooves us to take note of its nearness, not as a threat, but as our common experience on the way to grace. There is no more to be said. It is better to accept the will of God, and be silent. — Ellis Peters

Friendship exhibits a glorious "nearness by resemblance" to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "Holy, Holy, Holy" to one another (Isaiah VI, 3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have. — C.S. Lewis

[T]his impulse toward spiritual intimacy is found not only in the Abrahamic faiths, but in Buddhism, Hinduism, and native religions. Far too many people who understand God in these ways probably do not know how rich the tradition is that speaks of God with us, God in the stars and sunrise, God as the face of their neighbor, God in the act of justice, or God as the wonder of love. The language of divine nearness is the very heart of vibrant faith. Yet it has often been obscured by vertical theologies and elevator institutions, which, I suspect, are far easier to both explain and control. Drawing God within the circle of the world is a messy and sometimes dangerous business. — Diana Butler Bass

You don't serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I'll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God. We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it. — Flannery O'Connor

Modern man has lost any sense of God's nearness, but Christianity teaches that God reveals himself through every single thing he has ever brought into being, whether a created object or historical event. — R.C. Sproul

The kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of God on the earth will be combined together at Christ's coming - and that time is not far distant. How I wish we could get the vision of this work, the genius of it, and realize the nearness of that great event. I am sure it would have a sobering effect upon us if we realized what is before us. — Gordon B. Hinckley

The Holy One's nearness, the readiness to name the Holy One as God, and the recognition of God as Father. — James Carroll

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust. — T. S. Eliot

1:4 There is no contradiction of any proportion that we can possibly face that has what it takes to exasperate us or distance us from God. Our consciousness of his inseparable nearness immediately reinforces us to extend the same tangible 1closeness to you in your difficult times, and together we snuggle up in the 1comfort of his intimate embrace! — Francois Du Toit

True love is an intense desire for the presence of its object. God is only ours in reality when we are conscious of His nearness, and that is strange love of Him which is content to pass days without ever setting Him before itself. — Alexander MacLaren

Wide awake to the presence of God, I realized I had been so focused on asking why a good God allowed bad things to happen that I was missing out on the nearness of God all along. In becoming preoccupied with the why, I was missing the who. — Margaret Feinberg

The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home ... By the opening up of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their remoteness and nearness, their scope and limits. In a world's worlding is gathered that spaciousness out of which the protective grace of the gods is granted and withheld. Even this doom of the god remaining absent is a way in which the world worlds ... All coming to presence ... keeps itself concealed to the last. — Martin Heidegger

The third duty of a teacher is that he should not withhold from his students any advice. After he finishes the outward sciences, he should teach them the inward sciences. He should tell them that the object of education is to gain nearness of God, not power or richness and that God created ambition as a means of perpetuating knowledge which is essential for these sciences. — Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali

Warned by such evidences of their spiritual illness, believers profit by their humiliations. Robbed of their foolish confidence in the flesh, they take refuge in the grace of God. And when they have done so, they experience the nearness of the divine protection which is to them a strong fortress (Ps 30:6-7). — John Calvin

What a state of safety and privilege is this nearness to God through Jesus! Do you know it by experience? If you know it, are you living in the power of it? — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

When people quit talking to God, they quit talking to one another. And people who quit talking to God soon get very lonely and depressed. They are actually lonely for God, hungering for communion with Him, yearning for His close love and nearness; but instead of recognizing these needs as spiritual, they blame their lack of fulfillment on their husbands or wives. — David Wilkerson

I can admire the solemn and stately language of worship that recognizes the greatness of God, but it will not warm my heart or express my soul until it has also blended therewith the joyful nearness of that perfect love that casts out fear and ventures to speak with our Father in heaven as a child speaks with its father on earth. My brother, no veil remains. — Charles Spurgeon

I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself; my existence depends on the nearness and the presence of God. — Meister Eckhart

Mary's Song

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest...
you who have had so far
to come.) Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled
a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world.
Charmed by doves' voices, the whisper of straw,
he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed
who overflowed all skies,
all years.
Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught that I might be free,
blind in my womb to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth
for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must seen him torn. — Luci Shaw

Nearness to God brings likeness to God. The more you see God the more of God will be seen in you. — Charles Spurgeon

When it seems as if God is far away, remind yourself that He is near. Nearness is not a matter of geography. God is everywhere. Nearness is likeness. The more we become like the Lord, the nearer He is to us. — Warren W. Wiersbe