God Billboards Quotes

Oh my God..." Xhex's heart stopped as she looked at him in the mirror. Across his upper back, in a glorious spread of black ink...in a declaration that didn't whisper but shouted...in a billboard-size front with flourishes... Her name in the Old Language.

All masculine, hard-bodied and sensual, he was a deadly weapon sent by the gods to drive women mad, and a walking billboard for all things wicked and carnal. Orgasms! Get your orgasms here. Hot and juicy! Just how you like ‘em!

I saw a banner hanging next to city hall in downtown Philadelphia that read, "Kill them all, and let God sort them out." A bumper sticker read, "God will judge evildoers; we just have to get them to him." I saw a T-shirt on a soldier that said, "US Air Force... we don't die; we just go to hell to regroup." Others were less dramatic- red, white, and blue billboards saying, "God bless our troops." "God Bless America" became a marketing strategy. One store hung an ad in their window that said, "God bless America--$1 burgers." Patriotism was everywhere, including in our altars and church buildings. In the aftermath of September 11th, most Christian bookstores had a section with books on the event, calendars, devotionals, buttons, all decorated in the colors of America, draped in stars and stripes, and sprinkled with golden eagles. This burst of nationalism reveals the deep longing we all have for community, a natural thirst for intimacy... September 11th shattered the self-sufficient, autonomous individual, and we saw a country of broken fragile people who longed for community- for people to cry with, be angry with, to suffer with. People did not want to be alone in their sorrow, rage, and fear. But what happened after September 11th broke my heart. Conservative Christians rallies around the drums of war. Liberal Christian took to the streets. The cross was smothered by the flag and trampled under the feet of angry protesters. The church community was lost, so the many hungry seekers found community in the civic religion of American patriotism. People were hurting and crying out for healing, for salvation in the best sense of the word, as in the salve with which you dress a wound. A people longing for a savior placed their faith in the fragile hands of human logic and military strength, which have always let us down. They have always fallen short of the glory of God. ...The tragedy of the church's reaction to September 11th is not that we rallied around the families in New York and D.C. but that our love simply reflected the borders and allegiances of the world. We mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each Iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We got farther and farther from Jesus' vision, which extends beyond our rational love and the boundaries we have established. There is no doubt that we must mourn those lives on September 11th. We must mourn the lives of the soldiers. But with the same passion and outrage, we must mourn the lives of every Iraqi who is lost. They are just as precious, no more, no less. In our rebirth, every life lost in Iraq is just as tragic as a life lost in New York or D.C. And the lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like six September 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.

In general the churches ... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola: they promoted thirst without quenching it.

people should be careful of only looking for signs from God.” Remember the Devil can put up billboards too.

In that instant, your billboard careened ashore on a wall of water, cracking the back of my head. I reached for balance and touched what I thought was a puppy. Then you grabbed my finger. My God, I thought. It's a baby. I fainted dead away. That's how Macon found us the next day — me unconscious on half a billboard, you nestled in my arms, nursing on the pocket of my uniform. The half billboard said: "...Cafe...Proprietor." Our path seemed clear. I will always love your mother for letting you go, Soldier, and I will always love you for holding on. Love, the Colonel. PS: I apologize for naming you Moses. I didn't know you were a girl until it was too late.

A famous cigarette billboard pictures a curly-headed, bronze-faced, muscular macho with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth. The sign reads 'Where a man belongs.' That is a lie. Where a man belongs is at the bedside of his children, leading in devotion and prayer. Where a man belongs is leading his family to the house of God. Where a man belongs is up early and alone with God seeking vision and direction for the family.

God prefers kind atheists over hateful Christians.

There is one hour in his life when we see a flash of utter physical action on Christ's part, an hour when this most curious of men must have experienced the sheer joyous exuberance of a young mammal in full flight: when he lets himself go and flings over the first money changer's table in the Temple at Jerusalem, coins flying, doves thrashing into the air, oxen bellowing, sheep yowling, the money changer going head-over-teakettle, all heads turning, what the...? You don't think Christ got a shot of utter childlike physical glee at that moment? Too late to stop now, his rage rushing to his head, his veiny carpenter's-son wiry arms and hard feet milling as he whizzes through the Temple overturning tables, smashing birdcages, probably popping a furious money-changer here and there with a quick left jab or a well-placed Divine Right Elbow to the money-lending teeth, whipping his scourge of cords against the billboard-size flank of an ox, men scrambling to get out of the way, to grab some of the flying coins, to get a punch in on this nutty rube causing all the ruckus... In all this holy rage and chaos, don't you think there was a little absolute boyish mindless physical jittery joy in the guy?

I smile. "Mr. Perfect Beautiful Hockey God?" "Oh, shut up. You know it's true," she replies in a flat tone. "You should be the face of the NHL. They should put you on billboards in Times Square. You're hot and your charm levels are through the roof.

If you ask God the wrong question, don't expect Him to protect you from hearing the wrong answer. (Meaning: If you ask God whether you should cheat on your wife, don't consider a couple of falling stars or a billboard saying "Just do it" as a sign from above.)

not every breakfast needs to be something worthy of posting to a food blog. Sometimes food is simply fuel, something we eat to live. But with TV ads and billboards and in-store displays saying otherwise—in colorful and provocative ways—that can be a hard case to make.

They construct billboards out in the sea, painted allegories adorn their facades, hawking sex and sentiment to the opulent, the fortunate of the people of fortune, who bury their dead in the sand where the light of heaven is closest at dawn, and farther and farther away at twilight.

And I get it. I can be cynical myself. Every time I see some smiley TV preacher talk about God’s plan for me or hear Sarah Palin say something irretrievably mean and stupid about poor people, or every time I pass an embarrassing billboard featuring Jesus and a fetus, I totally get why reasonable people would keep their distance.

The mantle of intellectual meaninglessness shrouds every aspect of our common life. Events, things, and “information” flood over us, overwhelming us, disorienting us with threats and possibilities we for the most part have no idea what to do about. Commercials, catch words, political slogans, and high-flying intellectual rumors clutter our mental and spiritual space. Our minds and bodies pick them up like a dark suit picks up lint. They decorate us. We willingly emblazon messages on our shirts, caps—even the seat of our pants. Sometime back we had a national campaign against highway billboards. But the billboards were nothing compared to what we now post all over our bodies. We are immersed in birth-to-death and wall-to-wall “noise”—silent and not so silent.

The start of sin and destruction, discouragement and darkness, always happened with single thought. He couldn't stop that. Wrong thoughts were like the billboard signs on the highway of life. They were bound to come. Victory or defeat depended on how he handled the thought. "Take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ." The scripture from 2 Corinthians 10:5 came back to him now, the way it had countless other times. He grabbed the wayward thought and pushed it from his heart and mind. He wouldn't be afraid. Whatever happened... God was in control. He had nothing to fear. The Lord had worked a miracle to this point. He wasn't finished yet.

["What They Want"] Vallejo writing about loneliness while starving to death; Van Gogh's ear rejected by a whore; Rimbaud running off to Africa to look for gold and finding an incurable case of syphilis; Beethoven gone deaf; Pound dragged through the streets in a cage; Chatterton taking rat poison; Hemingway's brains dropping into the orange juice; Pascal cutting his wrists in the bathtub; Artaud locked up with the mad; Dostoevsky stood up against a wall; Crane jumping into a boat propeller; Lorca shot in the road by Spanish troops; Berryman jumping off a bridge; Burroughs shooting his wife; Mailer knifing his. -that's what they want: a God damned show a lit billboard in the middle of hell. that's what they want, that bunch of dull inarticulate safe dreary admirers of carnivals.

Batman as a Greek god is not too far off, because it’s the same idea at work: creating a superhuman version of humanity so that we can explore our problems, strengths, and weaknesses writ large. If the novel puts life under the microscope, mythology blows it up to billboard size.

Foundationally, fundamentalists believe that all goodness derives from their god, so the presence of anyone being good without their god is a constant reminder that something is wrong with their belief on the source of goodness. They fumble for other possibilities like the improbable idea that all atheists are bad or the absurd conclusion that atheists don't exist and instead, that atheists have just deluded themselves into thinking they are atheists. That's why fundamentalists react with such remarkable aversion and hate when confronted with the AHA's simple GOOD WITHOUT A GOD stickers, advertisements, and billboards. It's why they so vehemently characterize our positive personal statement as a personal attack on them.

what they want, Vallejo writing about loneliness while starving to death; Van Gogh’s ear rejected by a whore; Rimbaud running off to Africa to look for gold and finding an incurable case of syphilis; Beethoven gone deaf; Pound dragged through the streets in a cage; Chatterton taking rat poison; Hemingway’s brains dropping into the orange juice; Pascal cutting his wrists in the bathtub; Artaud locked up with the mad; Dostoevsky stood up against a wall; Crane jumping into a boat propeller; Lorca shot in the road by Spanish troops; Berryman jumping off a bridge; Burroughs shooting his wife; Mailer knifing his. – that’s what they want: a God damned show a lit billboard in the middle of hell. that’s what they want, that bunch of dull inarticulate safe dreary admirers of carnivals.

As preachers of the gospel spread throughout a society, and new life comes to more and more of the population, the preconditions for an open society are being established. The more the law of God is written on hearts and minds, which is what happens under the new covenant, the less necessary it is to have standards of public decency urged upon us from billboards.

My mind flashed to another billboard, this time one near a church in my neighborhood that said over a graphic of a failing heart monitor, “When you die, you will meet God.” This was meant as a threat, obviously—par for the course in my tradition—but Duncan’s response to it would be, “Why wait?” The hero’s journey was about going on an adventure to find a diamond only to realize it had been sewn into the lining of your coat the entire time. We were all beggars sitting on a box, not realizing the box we never bothered to open was filled with gold. We were already one with everything, already holy, already complete—we had just forgotten.

As God’s children, we are to use our lives knowing they reflect back to him and bear his image. Too often, instead of acting like mirrors pointing back to Jesus, we try to act like billboards, advertising ourselves.

Listen, if you preach a great series of topical sermons on marriage or finances or sex, your church plant might grow. If you are a savvy marketer and put up provocative billboards around town, your church might grow quickly. And people will think that you are great. You can wear trendy shirts, get blond tips in your hair, and wear a microphone that hooks around your ear. But if you preach God’s Word faithfully, few people will be tempted to think that you are great. If you stand up on Sunday morning and explain that when Jesus forgave the sins of the paralytic in Mark 2, he was claiming to be God and that the only way for sins to be forgiven was for God-in-the-flesh to take the punishment for our sins on himself on the cross, people will have one of two reactions: they will praise God, or they will think you are a complete idiot. That’s the point. God has designed it to work this way. You preach and people get saved to God’s glory, or their so-called “wisdom” is confounded and you look like a moron, also to God’s glory.

Commercials, catch words, political slogans, and high-flying intellectual rumors clutter our mental and spiritual space. Our minds and bodies pick them up like a dark suit picks up lint. They decorate us. We willingly emblazon messages on our shirts, caps—even the seat of our pants. Sometime back we had a national campaign against highway billboards. But the billboards were nothing compared to what we now post all over our bodies. We are immersed in birth-to-death and wall-to-wall “noise”—silent and not so silent.

There were open paddocks winking with sugar cane, and distant silos and then a billboard that they all yelped at because it showed a huge picture of a foetus alongside a picture of a young woman with her face in her hands, and some writing about life and God and mistakes and suffering.

Christmas lit the cigarette and snapped the match toward the open door, watching the flame vanish in midair. Then he was listening for the light, trivial sound which the dead match would make when it struck the floor; and then it seemed to him that he heard it. Then it seemed to him, sitting on the cot in the dark room, that he was hearing a myriad sounds of no greater volume—voices, murmurs, whispers: of trees, darkness, earth; people: his own voice; other voices evocative of names and times and places—which he had been conscious of all his life without knowing it, which were his life, thinking God perhaps and me not knowing that too He could see it like a printed sentence, fullborn and already dead God loves me too like the faded and weathered letters of last year’s billboard, God loves me too

A person has flaws but Jesus has none, quite like the images of models on billboards - you know why, because both images are doctored to sell a product - in case of the models, it's some cosmetic or some apparel, and in case of Jesus, it's religion.

IN THE WORLD OF advertising, every copywriter knows the power of two magic words: “Free!” and “New!” We see them in the supermarket, in the newspaper, on billboards. And consumers respond. In the church today, we are falling prey to the appeal of “New!” The old truths of the gospel don’t seem spectacular enough. We’re restless for the latest, greatest, newest teaching or technique. We pastors in particular seem to search for a shortcut or some dynamic new strategy that will fire up our churches.