If you say: I believed in God, I trusted God and He didn't come through - You only trusted God to meet your agenda.
Interpretation
True faith involves trusting God without expecting Him to fulfill our specific desires.
This quote by Timothy Keller highlights the concept that genuine belief in God transcends mere expectations of Him fulfilling our personal agendas. It suggests that faith should not be conditional upon receiving what we want, but rather a trust in God's greater purpose and wisdom, even when outcomes differ from our desires.
In practice
In a sermon about faith and expectations.
Falling in love in a Christian way is to say,'I am excited about your future and I want to be part of getting you there. I'm signing up for the journey with you. Would you sign up for the journey to my true self with me? It's going to be hard but I want to get there.
Only in Jesus Christ do we see how the untamable, infinite God can become a baby and a loving Savior. On the cross we see how both the love and the holiness of God can be fulfilled at once.
All human problems are ultimately symptoms, and our separation from God is the cause.
While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.
To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
God's Kingdom is "present in its beginnings, but still future in its fullness. This guards us from an under-realized eschatology (expecting no change now) and an over-realized eschatology (expecting all change now). In this stage, we embrace the reality that while we're not yet what we will be, we're also no longer what we used to be.
All social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have. been tolerated; forgetful that they themselves perhaps tolerate other inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as monstrous as what they have at last learnt to condemn.
A person's tragedy does not make up their entire life. A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren't one story. We can change our stories. We can write our own.
Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.
In the end, one or the other will triumph - a funeral dirge will be sung over the Soviet republic or over world capitalism.
And there you are on the shore, fitful and thoughtful, trying to attach them to an idea β some news of your own life. But the lilies are slippery and wildβthey are devoid of meaning, they are simply doing, from the deepest spurs of their being, what they are impelled to do every summer. And so, dear sorrow, are you.
Men shut their doors against a setting sun.
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