experience of God

1:At the point where all roads meet which lead from the Old Testament to the New we encounter the Marian experience of God, at once so rich and so secret that it almost escapes description.... In Mary, Zion passes over into that church ~ Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord I, 338,

* WISDOM TROVE *

1:I had a deep experience of God's love for me. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove

2:I want to have a lasting experience of God. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove

3:I deepen my experience of God through prayer, meditation, and forgiveness. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove

4:The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate. ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove

5:One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove

6:When reality explodes in you, you may call it experience of God. Or, rather, it is God experiencing you. God knows you when you know yourself. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove

7:Interior silence is one of the most strengthening and affirming of human experiences. There is nothing more affirming in fact, than the experience of God´s presence. That revelation says, as nothing else can, You are a good person, I created you and I love you. ~ thomas-keating, @wisdomtrove

8:The value of the Old Testament may be dependant on what seems its imperfection. It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to use it in another way-to find the Word in it... to re-live, while we read, the whole Jewish experience of God's gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel the very contentions between the Word and the human material through which it works. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove

9:Loneliness is the fundamental force that urgees mystics to a deeper union with God... An experience of God quenches this thirst for the absolute but at the same time, paradoxiacally, whets it, because this is an experience that can never be total; by necessity, the knowledge of God is always partial. So loneliness opens up mystics to a desire to love each other and every human being as God loves them. ~ jean-vanier, @wisdomtrove

10:Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing. In fact, you place so little value on experience that when what your experience of God differs from what you’ve heard of God, you automatically discard the experience and own the words, when it should be just the other way around. ~ neale-donald-walsch, @wisdomtrove

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:I had a deep experience of God's love for me. ~ Henri Nouwen,

2:I want to have a lasting experience of God. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,

3:Religion is a defense against the experience of God. ~ Carl Jung,

4:“Religion is a defense against the experience of God.” ~ Carl Jung,

5:An experience of God that costs nothing does nothing ~ Leonard Ravenhill,

6:Why should we not have a first-hand and immediate experience of God? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,

7:I deepen my experience of God through prayer, meditation, and forgiveness. ~ Marianne Williamson,

8:A man with an experience of God is never at the mercy of a man with an argument. ~ Leonard Ravenhill,

9:The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate. ~ Alice Walker,

10:Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other. ~ Simone Weil,

11:One of the main functions of formalized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God. ~ Carl Jung,

12:“One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.” ~ Carl Jung,

13:Life is an endless experience of God's. God doesn't even exist in nirvana, yet God exists in all other realms. ~ Frederick Lenz,

14:Doctrine is to be the balm of a healing experience of God, not a theological scalpel to wound and exclude people. ~ Diana Butler Bass,

15:Out of that aloneness - the experience of God. There is no other way; there has never been any and there is never going to be. ~ Rajneesh,

16:We need God in ways we do not know. Don't limit your experience of God to what you can think to ask. Ask for the unknown joy. ~ John Piper,

17:If you allow yourself to deepen with midlife, your experience of everything deepens, including your experience of God. ~ Marianne Williamson,

18:There is a direct relationship between a person's grasp and experience of God's grace, and his or her heart for justice and the poor. ~ Timothy Keller,

19:Our first experience of God is so important, we either experience Him as the police guard that wants to punish or as Creative Love that awaits. ~ Pope Benedict XVI,

20:It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence. ~ Frederick Buechner,

21:It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence. ~ Frederick Buechner,

22:no one in the biblical tradition ever is granted an experience of God without being subsequently sent. Scriptural religion is a religion of mission. ~ Robert E Barron,

23:I experience God as the power of life, the power of love and the ground of being. I don't say that's what God is; I say that's my experience of God. ~ John Shelby Spong,

24:and seeing that face, touching it and loving it in ourselves and others, is the experience of God. It is our divine humanness. It is the high we all seek. ~ Marianne Williamson,

25:the fear of God” is increased by an experience of God’s grace and forgiveness. What it describes is a loving, joyful awe and wonder before the greatness of God. ~ Timothy J Keller,

26:People with no experience of God tend to think that leaving the faith would be a liberation, a flight from guilt, rules, but what I couldn't forget was the joy I'd known, loving Him. ~ R O Kwon,

27:It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.6 ~ Brennan Manning,

28:I want to have a lasting experience of God,” I told him. “Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears”. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,

29:It is not the objective proof of God's existence that we want but the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get. ~ Frederick Buechner,

30:Spiritual desire is the experience of God’s presence in us or it may be the absence of God as well, since a feeling of absence may stimulate a yearning for God. It is the experience of delightful love and fearful emptiness. ~ Ilia Delio,

31:In fact, you place so little value on experience that when what you experience of God differs from what you’ve heard of God, you automatically discard the experience and own the words, when it should be just the other way around. ~ Neale Donald Walsch,

32:Jarrid Wilson has a passion and heart for God that is contagious. His genuine faith comes through powerfully in his teaching and writing. 30 Words points to the God of all wonder and grace in a way that will expand your faith and experience of God. ~ Jud Wilhite,

33:Well, as long as we do not know God experientially then we should at least realize that we are simply ideological believers,” Father Maximos replied dryly. “The ideal and ultimate form of true faith means having direct experience of God as a living reality.” I ~ Kyriacos C Markides,

34:Authority: The power the Bible possesses, having been issued from God, for which it “ought to be believed and obeyed” (Westminster Confession 1:4). Because of its divine author, the Bible is “the source and norm for such elements as belief, conduct, and the experience of God ~ Anonymous,

35:My answer to someone who is in contrast with me - by not seeing God in the scientific data - is that you don't see God in the scientific data because you're not me. I have other experiences than you have, that bring me to look at this data as enriching my experience of God. ~ George Coyne,

36:I sometimes fear that we have so redefined conversion in terms of human decisions and have so removed any necessity of the experience of God’s Spirit, that many people think they are saved when in fact they only have Christian ideas in their head not spiritual power in their heart. ~ John Piper,

37:Briefly and generally stated, mystical theology or Christian mysticism seeks to describe an experienced, direct, non-abstract, unmediated, loving knowing of God, a knowing or seeing so direct as to be called union with God.”[97] Such an experience of God came through “contemplation”—observing ~ Daryl Aaron,

38:Five obstacles block our access to the benefits God wants for us: Unbelief, which hinders knowing God Pride, which prevents us from glorifying God Idolatry, which keeps us from being satisfied with God Prayerlessness, which blocks our experience of God's peace Legalism, which stops our enjoyment of God's presence ~ Beth Moore,

39:Rather than thinking that genuine religious experience is always comforting, the sense that there is one who can see into the very depths of our being can cause us to turn and run from God. Such repulsion and fear arises from the actual experience of God, for to feel naked and ashamed before God presupposes some kind of relation with God. ~ Peter Rollins,

40:Whenever you have a clash of opposites in your being and neither will give way to the other (the bush will not be consumed and the fire will not stop), you can be certain that God is present. We dislike this experience intensely and avoid it at any cost; but if we can endure it, the conflict-without-resolution is a direct experience of God. A ~ Robert A Johnson,

41:I affirm, along with many others, that the major enduring religions of the world are all valid and legitimate. I see them as the responses to the experience of God in the various cultures in which each originated. To be Christian means to find the decisive revelation of God in Jesus. To be Muslim means to find the decisive revelation of God in the Koran. ~ Marcus Borg,

42:Such an image of one's god becomes a final obstruction, one's ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind. This is known as preserving your faith. ~ Joseph Campbell,

43:Mysticism, according to its historical and psychological definitions, is the direct intuition or experience of God; and a mystic is a person who has, to a greater or less degree, such a direct experience -- one whose religion and life are centered, not merely on an accepted belief or practice, but on that which the person regards as first hand personal knowledge. ~ Evelyn Underhill,

44:The value of the Old Testament may be dependant on what seems its imperfection. It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to use it in another way-to find the Word in it...to re-live, while we read, the whole Jewish experience of God's gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel the very contentions between the Word and the human material through which it works. ~ C S Lewis,

45:That Holy Other with which all spiritual persons are in relationship (that which I call God), is nothing other than that which satisfies the deepest longings of the human race. The spiritual relationship is a relationship of love-love beyond all telling. Spiritual experience is the experience of God's transcendent love, God's overwhelming and universal concern for every single human being. ~ Daniel P Sulmasy,

46:Loneliness is the fundamental force that urgees mystics to a deeper union with God... An experience of God quenches this thirst for the absolute but at the same time, paradoxiacally, whets it, because this is an experience that can never be total; by necessity, the knowledge of God is always partial. So loneliness opens up mystics to a desire to love each other and every human being as God loves them. ~ Jean Vanier,

47:Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing. In fact, you place so little value on experience that when what your experience of God differs from what you've heard of God, you automatically discard the experience and own the words, when it should be just the other way around. ~ Neale Donald Walsch,

48:I want to have a lasting experience of God', I told him. 'Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,

49:I want to have a lasting experience of God,” I told him. “Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don’t want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,

50:In a number of workshops, I have asked people whether they have had one or more experiences that they would identify as an experience of God and, if so, to share them in small groups. On average, 80 percent of the participants identify one or more and are eager to talk about them. They also frequently report that they had never before been asked that question in a church setting or given an opportunity to talk about it. ~ Marcus J Borg,

51:It is precisely women’s experience of God that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion, does not know God the spirit. God the lawgiver, God the judge, God the omnipotent being have consumed Western spirituality and, in the end, shriveled its heart. ~ Joan D Chittister,

52:The underground is a dangerous but potentially life-giving place to which depression takes us; a place where we come to understand that the self is not set apart or special or superior but is a common mix of good and evil, darkness and
light; a place where we can finally embrace the humanity we share with others. That is the best image I can offer not only of the underground but also of the field of forces surrounding the experience of God. ~ Parker J Palmer,

53:[Georg Cantor was the first to prove that there could be a series of infinities; that infinities come in an infinite number of sizes.] Thus Cantor's Absolute is a perfect image for what we experience of God. When I speak of a Big Enough God I am not merely thinking of an Infinite God, but the God of infinities, the Absolute, which either chooses to reveal itself or remains veiled in mystery. Modern mathematics does begin to feel like the language that God talks. ~ Sara Maitland,

54:When God has become a business, though, it is very hard for people to get the confidence to realize that God is really a personal God, a God who touches us as individuals, a God who is as close to us as we choose to see. We have learned well the remoteness of a God who lived for so long behind communion rails and altar steps and seminary doors and chancery desks that the experience of God, however strong, has always been more private secret than public expectation. ~ Joan D Chittister,

55:When we approach the Upanishads for an understanding of the Cosmic Mystery, we are coming to the very heart of the Hindu experience of God. This is what we want to try to understand, not with our minds, but with our hearts: to enter into the heart and continually remind ourselves that the Upanishads are intended to lead us to the heart. The Greek fathers of the Church used to say, "Lead the thoughts from the head into the heart and keep them there." This is to open to the Cosmic Mystery. ~ Bede Griffiths,

56:If doctrinal soundness is not accompanied by heart experience, it will lead eventually to nominal Christianity—that is, in name only—and eventually to nonbelief. The irony is that many conservative Christians, most concerned about conserving true and sound doctrine, neglect the importance of prayer and make no effort to experience God, and this can lead to the eventual loss of sound doctrine. Owen believes that Christianity without real experience of God will eventually be no Christianity at all. ~ Timothy J Keller,

57:The problems with this concentration on God’s wrath are pluriform. First and foremost, it contradicts the experience that most of us have with God, and that a lot of us have with the Bible. Our experience of God is not of wrath, but of love. Indeed, that’s how most people experience God even before they accept the idea that Christ stands between us and God. So it seems odd to first have to convince people that God’s wrath burns against them, then to convince them that Jesus lovingly took on that wrath. ~ Tony Jones,

58:What do the Christian mystics tell us? That the wisdom they offer us can literally unite us with God—or at the very least, give us such a powerful experience of God's presence that it can revolutionize our lives. The purpose of such transformed lives is not primarily to achieve a goal (like enlightenment or spiritual bliss), but rather to participate in the Holy Spirit's ongoing activity—embodying the flowing love of Christ, love that we in turn give back to God as well as to “our neighbors as ourselves. ~ Carl McColman,

59:There is only one basic desire that motivates the spiritual seeker-to make the experience of God, of divine bliss and joy, the center of the life experience. We are spiritual beings living in a material universe, and as such, our first priority is to nurture that eternal part of us. The eleventh step of AA's twelve-step program states it beautifully: "Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out." ~ Douglas Bloch,

60:Moyers: But if God is the god we have only imagined, how can we stand in awe of our own creation?
Campbell: How can we be terrified by a dream? You have to break past your image of God to get through to the connoted illumination. The psychologist Jung has a relevant saying: "Religion is a defense against the experience of God."
...
There is a Hindu saying, "None but a god can worship a god." You have to identify yourself in some measure with whatever spiritual principle your god represents to you in order to worship him properly and live according to his word. ~ Joseph Campbell,

61:I do not believe we can truly enter into our own inner pain and wounds and open our hearts to others unless we have had an experience of God, unless we have been touched by God. We must be touched by the Father in order to experience, as the prodigal son did, that no matter how wounded we may be, we are loved. And not only are we loved, but we too are called to heal and to liberate. This healing power in us will not come from our capacities and our riches, but in and through our poverty. We are called to discover that God can bring peace, compassion and love through our wounds. ~ Jean Vanier,

62:The study of numbers is ancient and respected. Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher, who is often considered to be the father of numerology, felt “numbers to be the ultimate elements of the universe.” Even as late as the Renaissance, churches were constructed using mystical number systems that the architects believed enhanced an experience of God while within their walls. Colors and numbers both have significance. In this book they are used together, as numerology teaches us that each number has an associated color; and that each month, each day, the vibrations change. As the number vibrations change, so do the colors. ~ Louise L Hay,

63:A mystical experience—and by this I mean to include those experiences of spiritual release and transcendence (in nature, in prayer, in art, etc.) that are available to every single person who will prepare himself for and accept them—does not simply result in action; its reality is confirmed only within action. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the night before his death, Jesus is said to have prayed so hard that he sweated blood—a metaphor, I take it, but in any event a suggestion that his experience of God at that moment was what we would call mystical (it’s not all harp music and happy rapture, this brush with Beyond). ~ Christian Wiman,

64:the text itself tells us that the calf was not originally meant as an alternative to, or reification of, God but was designed as a visual aid to worship. After all, Aaron attempts to point out the limitations of the calf by proclaiming a day of festival specifically in the name of YHWH.11 The point was that it was only meant to be an object that provided a focal point for reflecting upon the genuine experience of God in their midst. Yet the people were quick to view this object as a visual manifestation of the God who delivered them from Egypt. As such the image became an idol to the people and eclipsed the genuine experience of God. ~ Peter Rollins,

65:Women learn in such a system that, though they are usually tolerated in life and often loved, they are seldom respected for themselves, for their opinions, for their talents, for their perspectives. The life of a woman shrivels under the weight of an unnatural deference and lost development. Women live knowing that inside themselves is a capped well, a fount of untapped treasure, a person gone to waste. The spiritual life of a woman never knows total maturation in an environment that never seeks her opinions, her interpretations, her insights, and her experience of God. Whatever ministry she was born to perform never comes to light, is lost to the church, dies on the vines that were never cultivated. ~ Joan D Chittister,

66:When I speak elsewhere in the book of the multifaceted joys of the resurrected life in the new universe, some readers may think, But our eyes should be on the giver, not the gift; we must focus on God, not on Heaven. This approach sounds spiritual, but it erroneously divorces our experience of God from life, relationships, and the world—all of which God graciously gives us. It sees the material realm and other people as God’s competitors rather than as instruments that communicate his love and character. It fails to recognize that because God is the ultimate source of joy, and all secondary joys emanate from him, to love secondary joys on Earth can be—and in Heaven always will be—to love God, their source. ~ Randy Alcorn,

67:Early-stage religion is largely preparing you for the immense gift of this burning, this inner experience of God, as though creating a proper stable into which the Christ can be born. Unfortunately, most people get so preoccupied with their stable, and whether their stable is better than your stable, or whether their stable is the only “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” stable, that they never get to the birth of God in the soul. There is no indication in the text that Jesus demanded ideal stable conditions; in fact, you could say that the specific mentioning of his birth in a “manger” is making the exact opposite point. Animals at least had room for him, while there was “no room for him in the inn” (Luke 2:8) where humans dwelled. As ~ Richard Rohr,

68:in this direction-and he has been dead for not more than a quarter of a century. His influence is far more subtle and indirect and yet all-pervasive than Blavatsky. James Branch Cabel's Jurgen used a number of Crowley's ideas and rituals without acknowledgment, and I fancy the current hippie bible, Robert Heinlein's A Stranger in a Strange Land, owes a very great deal to Aleister Crowley, though this too is unacknowledged. But a lot of other people are using his ideas quite freely without feeling obligated to mention his name. Crowley would not have minded this, so intent was he on shaking the foundations and the roofing of the social structure of our age. He challenged unequivocally the basic religious attitudes of our society, stressing the idea of personal experience of God through the pursuit of time-honored paths and techniques. He was also an advocate of the occasional use of the psychedelic drugs as giving one a foretaste of the kind of experience to be aimed ~ Christopher S Hyatt,

69:I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, ‘I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!’

Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America. ~ C S Lewis,

70:April 29 MORNING “Thou art my hope in the day of evil.” — Jeremiah 17:17 THE path of the Christian is not always bright with sunshine; he has his seasons of darkness and of storm. True, it is written in God’s Word, “Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace;” and it is a great truth, that religion is calculated to give a man happiness below as well as bliss above; but experience tells us that if the course of the just be “As the shining light that shineth more and more unto the perfect day,” yet sometimes that light is eclipsed. At certain periods clouds cover the believer’s sun, and he walks in darkness and sees no light. There are many who have rejoiced in the presence of God for a season; they have basked in the sunshine in the earlier stages of their Christian career; they have walked along the “green pastures” by the side of the “still waters,” but suddenly they find the glorious sky is clouded; instead of the Land of Goshen they have to tread the sandy desert; in the place of sweet waters, they find troubled streams, bitter to their taste, and they say, “Surely, if I were a child of God, this would not happen.” Oh! say not so, thou who art walking in darkness. The best of God’s saints must drink the wormwood; the dearest of His children must bear the cross. No Christian has enjoyed perpetual prosperity; no believer can always keep his harp from the willows. Perhaps the Lord allotted you at first a smooth and unclouded path, because you were weak and timid. He tempered the wind to the shorn lamb, but now that you are stronger in the spiritual life, you must enter upon the riper and rougher experience of God’s full-grown children. We need winds and tempests to exercise our faith, to tear off the rotten bough of self-dependence, and to root us more firmly in Christ. The day of evil reveals to us the value of our glorious hope. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

WORDNET

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *