God Centred Relationship Quotes

If you know what He has done at infinite cost to himself—He’s put you into a relationship so that you’ll never be rejected by Him—then your motivation when you sin is to go get Him. You want fellowship with Him. When the thing that most assures you is the thing that most convicts you, you’ll be okay because when you’re convicted of sin in a gospel way it drives you toward God. Without the gospel we hate ourselves instead of our sin. Without the gospel we’re motivated through all sorts of awful fear and pride to change and it doesn’t really change our hearts; it just restrains our hearts.

My God, I hate you! ’ she flung at him. ‘Do you really?’ Andreas sneered, and his face was savage. ‘Well, I’ve got news for you, my darling. What you feel for me is lukewarm compared to what I feel for you.

The shattered relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at the cross provides the basis for our reconciliation. No other relationship ever suffered more than what Father, Son, and Holy Spirit endured when Jesus hung on the cross and cried, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Jesus was willing to be the rejected Son so that our families would know reconciliation. Jesus was willing to become the forsaken friend so that we could have loving friendships. Jesus was willing to be the rejected Lord so that we could live in loving submission to one another. Jesus was willing to be the forsaken brother so that we could have godly relationships. Jesus was willing to be the crucified King so that our communities would experience peace.

I am the most important person to me. I am the most important person in the entire universe to me. I am the centre of my own universe.

In the eighteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment focused attention on Glasgow and Edinburgh as centres of intellectual activity. The Scottish Enlightenment was an intellectual movement which originated in Glasgow in the early eighteenth century, and flourished in Edinburgh in the second half of the century. Its thinking was based on philosophical enquiry and its practical applications for the benefit of society ('improvement' was a favoured term). The Enlightenment encompassed literature, philosophy, science, education, and even geology. One of its lasting results was the founding of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-71). The effects of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially in the second half of the century, were far-reaching in Britain and Europe. The philosophical trends ranged from the 'common-sense' approach of Thomas Reid to the immensely influential works of David Hume, notably his Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739. Here, his arguments on God, and the cause and effect of man's relationship with God, are far ahead of their time in the philosophical debate in Britain: .... ... Adam Smith's book The Wealth of Nations (1776) was probably the most important work on economics of the century, revolutionising concepts of trade and prophesying the growing importance of America as 'one of the foremost nations of the world'. By a remarkable coincidence, the book was published in the very same year as the American Declaration of Independence.

Believing is not to be reduced to thinking that such-and-such might be the case. It is not a weaker form of thinking, laced with doubt. Sometimes we speak like this: ‘I believe that the train leaves at 6:13', where ‘I believe that’ simply means that ‘I think (but am not certain) that’. Since the left hemisphere is concerned with what is certain, with knowledge of the facts, its version of belief is that it is just absence of certainty. If the facts were certain, according to its view, I should be able to say ‘I know that’ instead. This view of belief comes from the left hemisphere's disposition towards the world: interest in what is useful, therefore fixed and certain (the train timetable is no good if one can't rely on it). So belief is just a feeble form of knowing, as far as it is concerned. But belief in terms of the right hemisphere is different, because its disposition towards the world is different. The right hemisphere does not ‘know’ anything, in the sense of certain knowledge. For it, belief is a matter of care: it describes a relationship, where there is a calling and an answering, the root concept of ‘responsibility’. Thus if I say that ‘I believe in you’, it does not mean that I think that such-and-such things are the case about you, but can't be certain that I am right. It means that I stand in a certain sort of relation of care towards you, that entails me in certain kinds of ways of behaving (acting and being) towards you, and entails on you the responsibility of certain ways of acting and being as well. It is an acting ‘as if’ certain things were true about you that in the nature of things cannot be certain. It has the characteristic right-hemisphere qualities of being a betweenness: a reverberative, ‘re-sonant’, ‘respons-ible’ relationship, in which each party is altered by the other and by the relationship between the two, whereas the relationship of the believer to the believed in the left-hemisphere sense is inert, unidirectional, and centres on control rather than care. I think this is what Wittgenstein was trying to express when he wrote that ‘my’ attitude towards the other is an ‘attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.’ An ‘opinion’ would be a weak form of knowledge: that is not what is meant by a belief, a disposition or an ‘attitude’. This helps illuminate belief in God. This is not reducible to a question of a factual answer to the question ‘does God exist?’, assuming for the moment that the expression ‘a factual answer’ has a meaning. It is having an attitude, holding a disposition towards the world, whereby that world, as it comes into being for me, is one in which God belongs. The belief alters the world, but also alters me. Is it true that God exists? Truth is a disposition, one of being true to someone or something. One cannot believe in nothing and thus avoid belief altogether, simply because one cannot have no disposition towards the world, that being in itself a disposition. Some people choose to believe in materialism; they act ‘as if’ such a philosophy were true. An answer to the question whether God exists could only come from my acting ‘as if’ God is, and in this way being true to God, and experiencing God (or not, as the case might be) as true to me. If I am a believer, I have to believe in God, and God, if he exists, has to believe in me. Rather like Escher's hands, the belief must arise reciprocally, not by a linear process of reasoning. This acting ‘as if’ is not a sort of cop-out, an admission that ‘really’ one does not believe what one pretends to believe. Quite the opposite: as Hans Vaihinger understood, all knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is no more than an acting ‘as if’ certain models were, for the time being, true. Truth and belief, once more, as in their etymology, are profoundly connected. It is only the left hemisphere that thinks there is certainty to be found anywhere.

Sometimes, instructing children in the old days, he had been asked by some black lozenge-eyed Indian child, What is God like? and he would answer facilely with references to the father and the mother, or perhaps more ambitiously he would include brother and sister and try to give some idea of all loves and relationships combined in an immense and yet personal passion....But at the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery—that we were made in God's image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God's image had thought out, and God's image shook now, up and down on the mule's back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and god's image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. He said, Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot? and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God's image. Such a lot of beauty. Saints talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain. That is beautiful in that corner—to them. It needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint's eye: a saint gets a subtle taste for beauty and can look down on poor ignorant palates like theirs. But we can't afford to.

I am concerned with having a relationship in which there is no conflict whatsoever, in which I am not using or exploiting another, either sexually, for reasons of pleasure, or for the sake of companionship. I see very clearly that conflict destroys any form of relationship, so I must resolve that conflict at the very centre, not at the periphery. And I can only put an end to conflict by understanding action, not only in relationship but in daily life. I want to find out if all my activities are isolating, in the sense that I have built a wall round myself; the wall being myself concerned with myself, with my future, my happiness, my health, my God, with my belief, my success, my misery – you follow? Or is it that relationship has nothing whatsoever to do with me or myself? Myself is the centre, and all the activities that are concerned with my happiness, my satisfaction, my glory must isolate. Where there is isolation there must be attachment and dependency; when there is uncertainty in that attachment and dependency then there is suffering, and suffering implies isolation in any relationship. I see all this very clearly, not verbally but

The men who had inhabited prehistoric Egypt, who had carved the Sphinx and founded the world‘s oldest civilization, were men who had made their exodus from Atlantis to settle on this strip of land that bordered the Nile. And they had left before their ill-fated continent sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a catastrophe which had drained the Sahara and turned it into a desert. The shells which to-day litter the surface of the Sahara in places, as well as the fossil fish which are found among its sands, prove that it was once covered by the waters of a vast ocean. It was a tremendous and astonishing thought that the Sphinx provided a solid, visible and enduring link between the people of to-day and the people of a lost world, the unknown Atlanteans. This great symbol has lost its meaning for the modern world, for whom it is now but an object of local curiosity. What did it mean to the Atlanteans? We must look for some hint of an answer in the few remnants of culture still surviving from peoples whose own histories claimed Atlantean origin. We must probe behind the degenerate rituals of races like the Incas and the Mayas, mounting to the purer worship of their distant ancestors, and we shall find that the loftiest object of their worship was Light, represented by the Sun. Hence they build pyramidal Temples of the Sun throughout ancient America. Such temples were either variants or slightly distorted copies of similar temples which had existed in Atlantis. After Plato went to Egypt and settled for a while in the ancient School of Heliopolis, where he lived and studied during thirteen years, the priest-teachers, usually very guarded with foreigners, favoured the earnest young Greek enquirer with information drawn from their well-preserved secret records. Among other things they told him that a great flat-topped pyramid had stood in the centre of the island of Atlantis, and that on this top there had been build the chief temple of the continent – a sun temple. […] The Sphinx was the revered emblem in stone of a race which looked upon Light as the nearest thing to God in this dense material world. Light is the subtlest, most intangible of things which man can register by means of one of his five senses. It is the most ethereal kind of matter which he knows. It is the most ethereal element science can handle, and even the various kind of invisible rays are but variants of light which vibrate beyond the power of our retinas to grasp. So in the Book of Genesis the first created element was Light, without which nothing else could be created. „The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Deep,“ wrote Egyptian-trained Moses. „And God said, Let there be Light: and there was Light.“ Not only that, it is also a perfect symbol of that heavenly Light which dawns within the deep places of man‘s soul when he yields heart and mind to God; it is a magnificent memorial to that divine illumination which awaits him secretly even amid the blackest despairs. Man, in turning instinctively to the face and presence of the Sun, turns to the body of his Creator. And from the sun, light is born: from the sun it comes streaming into our world. Without the sun we should remain perpetually in horrible darkness; crops would not grow: mankind would starve, die, and disappear from the face of this planet. If this reverence for Light and for its agent, the sun, was the central tenet of Atlantean religion, so also was it the central tenet of early Egyptian religion. Ra, the sun-god, was first, the father and creator of all the other gods, the Maker of all things, the One, the self-born [...] If the Sphinx were connected with this religion of Light, it would surely have some relationship with the sun.

April 6 The Collision of God and Sin Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree. 1 Peter 2:24 The Cross of Jesus is the revelation of God’s judgement on sin. Never tolerate the idea of martyrdom about the Cross of Jesus Christ. The Cross was a superb triumph in which the foundations of hell were shaken. There is nothing more certain in Time or Eternity than what Jesus Christ did on the Cross: He switched the whole of the human race back into a right relationship with God. He made Redemption the basis of human life, that is, He made a way for every son of man to get into communion with God. The Cross did not happen to Jesus: He came on purpose for it. He is “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” The whole meaning of the Incarnation is the Cross. Beware of separating God manifest in the flesh from the Son becoming sin. The Incarnation was for the purpose of Redemption. God became incarnate for the purpose of putting away sin; not for the purpose of Self-realisation. The Cross is the centre of Time and of Eternity, the answer to the enigmas of both. The Cross is not the cross of a man but the Cross of God, and the Cross of God can never be realised in human experience. The Cross is the exhibition of the nature of God, the gateway whereby any individual of the human race can enter into union with God. When we get to the Cross, we do not go through it; we abide in the life to which the Cross is the gateway. The centre of salvation is the Cross of Jesus, and the reason it is so easy to obtain salvation is because it cost God so much. The Cross is the point where God and sinful man merge with a crash and the way to life is opened—but the crash is on the heart of God.

Now, it has been pointed out that the vijnani gains back an ego when he emerges from the nirvikalpa state. But this ego or individuality is entirely different in quality from that of the unenlightened man. To put it briefly, the ordinary man's ego is body-centred, while the vijnani's is God-centred. The body-centred ego is based on a sense of absolute reality of difference, and expresses itself in terms of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ with regard to all objects and individuals. It evaluates everything and everyone in terms of their contribution to its pleasure and survival. An egocentred man may love others, but it is in terms of his narrow self and the preservation of that narrow self and its interests is his primary concern in life. In contrast to this, the vijnani's ego is entirely based on a sense of intimate relationship with God as His son, servant, comrade, sweetheart, etc. He looks upon all beings and objects, irrespective of their attitude towards him as a friend, foe or neutral as manifestations of the Lord to be loved and served, and not as objects for his enjoyment and aggrandisement

The way this question was phrased by the leading thinkers of the time was like this: ‘Where is the Way?’ The question of the Way (in Chinese ‘Dao’) is the single most important question that shaped Chinese religious civilization. It is important to appreciate how different this question is from the questions that have shaped Western civilization, namely the questions generated in classical Greek philosophy and Semitic religion. The questions that arose in Greek philosophy, such as ‘What is truth?’ or ‘What is goodness?’ suggest that wisdom consists in understanding fundamental abstract categories or first principles, which can then be applied to specific situations. From these abstract categories emerged the great Western disciplines of logic, metaphysics, law and science. The questions that arose in Semitic religions, such as ‘How may I obey the will of the creator?’ led to a religious life centred on the relationship between one god and a community of believers founded upon commandments and ethical precepts. When approaching Daoism, it is important to understand that Daoism is shaped neither by the categories of logical philosophy nor by the categories of belief in a monotheistic god who created the world out of nothing.

Dear reader, I guess there’s a chance – just the tiniest chance – that I might hunt you down. Beforehand I’d always let such a frivolous impulse fade but these days – and I am not proud of this – the pictures lurking in the corners of my mind are gaining in colour, detail and intensity. I fight them, I really do, but the scenario seems to have a life of its own, slowly taking shape and maybe dreaming of the day it gets unleashed into the real world. Becomes flesh and blood, if you like. And despite my very best efforts at restraint, I’m afraid I’ve already started... planning. You know, plotting a bit. Gathering details about your movements and habits. That sort of thing. And if I’m pushed, I might admit to lingering on the finer points of your demise, perhaps even gorging on the sight of your stricken face as I finally take centre stage in your life. You see, I guess I’m just tired of your lack of appreciation. Let’s face it, I’m not exactly the first name on your Christmas card list. I’m still waiting for you to swing by for a cuppa and a few kind words. Hey, a simple email would have been enough. Don’t you know how precious a bit of encouragement can be? And here’s the rub: for as long as I can remember I have been on my knees in front of you only to be treated like the invisible man. You’ve repeatedly ignored my imploring face and open arms, although occasionally you’ve stopped and dallied, causing my heart to skitter wildly. I can’t begin to tell you how much it means to be noticed. It’s so... nourishing. After all, a flower can’t bloom in the dark. But then it dawns on me that you’re not committed to our fledgling relationship. In fact, it’s just a flirtation and soon you’ll be skipping on your merry way. Whatever trifling affection you have shown, it’s clear you’ll never bang the drum for little old me. And don’t think I don’t know about the others. The ones you fawn over. Just tell me – why are you so in thrall with their rampant mediocrity? Hell, maybe they’ve somehow infected you, skewed your take on things and made you unable to sort the wheat from the chaff. Perhaps I should offer condolences but the fact remains that kneeling before you with my heart in my hands only seems to result in you jumping into bed with them. Do you not understand how much love I’ve lavished on you? Call me tetchy, but some days you simply seem unworthy of my great sacrifice. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. All is not lost. For here we are again meeting as equals and this time I know I have your attention. I can only hope you have lost the desire to bait me, or God forbid, spit in my face. So help me. Accept my tender embrace. Or one day, dear reader, you might find the invisible man taking shape right in front of your disbelieving eyes. And you’d only have yourself to blame.

You always draw your energy and inspiration from whoever is the centre of your life. In love, you become the one you love. If it’s a materialistic person, you’ll find yourself becoming increasingly materialistic too. If he or she is a spiritual person, you’ll evolve into a calmer person. If he or she is the restless or narcissistic type, you’ll feel restless and anxious yourself. If the centre of your life is beauty, divinity, compassion, God and such like, you’ll become an embodiment of that. Choose carefully.