A Quote by Philip Yancey
You are free to reject God. Make sure that you're really rejecting God, not some caricature of God that the church has shown you. But I, one, respect a God who not only allows us to reject Him but includes the arguments we can use against Him in the Bible. I respect that.
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The greatest gift God gave us is also our greatest curse, which is the free will. We are made in God's image, the Bible says, which means we have the ability to love him or not love him, to reject him or not reject him.
God's love is so extravagant and so inexplicable that he loved us before we were us. He loved us before we existed. He knew many of us would reject him, hate him, curse him, rebel against him. Yet he chose to love us. God loves us because he is love.
God’s love sets us free from the need to seek approval. Knowing that we are loved by God, accepted by God, approved by God, and that we are new creations in Christ empowers us to reject self-rejection and embrace a healthy self-love. Being secure in God’s love for us, our love for Him, and our love for ourselves, prepares us to fulfill the second greatest commandment: To love our neighbor as ourselves.
God did not make us robots. In spite of the denial by Luther, Calvin, and many evangelical leaders today, God gave man a will to freely choose to love or to hate Him, to receive Christ as Savior and Lord or to reject Him.
It is fashionable in some academic circles to exercise scholarly criticism of the Bible. In so doing, scholars place themselves above the Bible and seek to correct it. If indeed the Bible is the Word of God, nothing could be more arrogant. It is God who corrects us; we don’t correct Him. We do not stand over God but under Him.
God specifically created us to be like Him. This is impossible to wrap our minds around, but God created us like Him in some respect and then set us in the midst of this world to represent Him!
The issue in the Bible is not just "Do you believe in God or not?" Everybody believed in gods of some sort. The question was, "Who is truly the only living God?" And if that God is indeed Yahweh the God of Israel, then there are consequences in real life - as shown in the Torah.
At great cost to Himself, God has made it possible for each of us to live with Him eternally. Those who reject God's offer of a heavenly home will be assigned to hell.
The Bible portrays God as entering into covenants with people which, when broken, causes him grief and sorrow. The biblical prophet Hosea and God's using him as an illustration of how much Israel's idolatry costs God emotionally points to God's vulnerability. But also the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ who, even as God the Son, suffered for our sins, points to God's vulnerability.
But those who chose to reject God during their lifetime on earth will be separated from him for eternity. This is not God's desire, but man's own choice. God holds every man accountable for his rejection of Christ.
God's love never ceases. Never. Though we spurn him. Ignore him. Reject him. Despise him. Disobey him. He will not change. Our evil cannot diminish his love. Our goodness cannot increase it. Our faith does not earn it any more than our stupidity jeopardizes it. God doesn't love us less if we fail or more if we succeed. God's love never ceases.
Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who as a heaven for every body, but a hell for none; a God who can allow good and bad to be side by side in time, but will make no distinction between good and broad in eternity. Such a God is an idol of your own, as truly an idol as any snake or crocodile in an Egyptian temple. The hands of your own fancy and sentimentality have made him. He is not the God of the Bible, and beside the God of the Bible there is no God at all.
There is no one ugly, deep, dark, powerful or evil enough to stop God from loving you. Nothing anyone can ever do to you can sever your connection to God. Nothing you could ever do can dam the unstoppable love of God for you. His love for you is undeniable, unrelenting and unconditional. You may ignore God, ridicule Him and reject Him but His love for you will remain constant and unchanging.
God has not only made the promise of the Holy Spirit, He has actually given Him to us. It's up to us now to receive Him. But for you to receive from God, you will have to be ready to respond to Him by faith. Until you respond to God by faith, you do not receive from Him, because God is a faith-God.
The God of the modern evangelical rarely astonishes anybody. He manages to stay pretty much with the constitution. Never break our by-laws. He's a very well-behaved God and very denominational and very much like one of us...we ask Him to help us when we're in trouble and look to Him to watch over us when we're asleep. The God of the modern evangelical isn't a God I could have much respect for.
Praise consists in the love of God, in wonder at the goodness of God, in recognition of the gifts of God, in seeing God in all things He gives us, ay, and even in the things that He refuses to us; so as to see our whole life in the light of God; and seeing this, to bless Him, adore Him, and glorify Him.
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