Surprised by God Quotes

“God finds us lovely when we are anything but desirable, and in that very finding, he makes us what we otherwise are not and could never be. His desire for us is what makes us desirable.”
― Chris E. W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

“Obedience, therefore, is not the breaking of our will by a more powerful will; obedience is the healing of our will by participation in its source.”
― Chris E. W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

“We understand nothing yet in the light of the gospel until we grasp that God’s power is revealed most completely for us in the weakness of the cross.”
― Chris E. W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

“Sin, therefore, is not the failure to live a good, clean life but the refusal to let God’s goodness come alive in us for the good of others.”
― Chris E. W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

“Perhaps that is where we too often find ourselves: believing strongly—but in misunderstandings of God’s word. We trust God as provider, but rely on our own sense of need. We trust God as healer, but assume we know what health is. We trust God as deliverer and protector, but expect that deliverance to come on our own terms and in our own time.”
― Chris E. W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

“Jesus’s miracle, stunning and spectacular as it is, convinces exactly no one of his messiahship.”
― Chris E. W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

“God’s presence does not come and go. Certainly not in response to our desire for it. God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, closer than our own consciousness, nearer than our very being.”
― Chris E. W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

“we recognize sin as whatever it is that frustrates or defaces our joy, whatever it is that keeps us from resting in the event of God that is the source of our life.”
― Chris E. W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

“As Bonhoeffer reminds us in his christology lectures, the incarnation is not a humiliation for God—it is not as if God finds it unbecoming to take humanity as his own! The incarnation is a humiliation for us, because God comes among us as one without beauty, without desirability or comeliness, making nonsense of every frame of reference, every standard of judgment, every order and scheme we have devised for ourselves as a means of giving our lives significance and stability.”
― Chris E. W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

“If we desire what is good in ways that are not good, we can rest assured that God will gracefully disappoint us. If what we find delightful in God is in fact an illusion, God has promised to go on revealing his true beauty until we find that beauty truly desirable.”
― Chris E. W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

“when in worship we confess that we are sinners, we are not engaging in self-hatred or self-abuse. Just the opposite, in fact. We are acknowledging to ourselves and to others before God our absolute helplessness to live the lives we want and need to live.”
― Chris E. W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

“God by nature is supremely knowable, and because he is good, he desires to be known by creatures in ways fitted to the reality purposed for us.”
― Chris E. W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

“The fear of judgment, in particular, keeps us from being gracefully present to those most in need.”
― Chris E. W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters

“with all illnesses and disease in all times and places: it is “for God’s glory.” But this does not mean that God first imposes illness so that he can later dramatically heal it. God’s work does not need to be staged for effect, and God never needs to rely on tricks of timing to demonstrate his power. Illness—disease or suffering of any kind—is what happens in a world gone wrong, a world in which God is willing that his will not be done, at least not all-at-once.”
― Chris E. W. Green, Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters