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Quote by Craig S. Keener

“An important step in getting to know God is to realize how available he is to us. In learning to hear God, it helps us to take on faith the fact that we are already in his presence. If we must make ourselves worthy of his presence first, we will never get there.”

Quote by Craig S. Keener

Work

Gift and Giver

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Author

Craig S. Keener
Craig S. Keener

Craig S. Keener is an American author born in 1960. His works span various fields including biblical studies and theology, and he is renowned for his extensive academic contributions and in-depth research. more

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“We usually hear what we want to hear and turn a deaf ear to everything else. But remember the package deal? If we don't listen to everything God has to say, we eventually won't hear anything He has to say. And we probably need to hear most what we want to hear least. But this I know for sure: His tone of voice is always loving. Sometimes it's tough love in the form of rebuke or discipline, but it's loving, nonetheless.”

“As we grow our faith, we wait in silence. As we listen for His voice, we have hope that He will speak. It may not be a loud boom or thunder, but a soft whisper. He may use a song, a butterfly, a sermon, a stranger, or even a red cardinal, but there is hope that God will come through for us.”

“My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognised things according to expectation and environment. If you were in a particular place, you expected to see particular things. Sheep and hills, sea and fish; if there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs. Jones and talk about fishcakes. But most likely, she's do what most people do when confronted with something they don't understand. Panic.”

“Things are continually beginning again; they’re never really resolved, you know. They are only resolved temporarily. We live in a society that peddles solutions, whether it’s solutions to those extra pounds you’re carrying, or to your thinning hair, or to your loss of appetite, loss of love. We are always looking for solutions, but actually what we are engaged in is a process throughout life during which you never get it right. You have to keep being open, you have to keep moving forward. You have to keep finding out who you are and how you are changing, and only that makes life tolerable.”

“Mrs. Winterson didn't want her body resurrected because she had never, ever loved it, not even for a single minute of a single day But although she believed in End Time, she felt that the bodily resurrection was unscientific. When I asked her about this she told me she had seen Pathé newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she knew all about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. She had lived through the war. Her brother had been in the air force, my dad had been in the army -- it was their life, not their history. She said that after the atomic bomb you couldn't believe in mass any more, it was all about energy. 'This life is all mass. When we go, we'll be all energy, that's all there is to it.' I have thought about this a lot over the years. She had understood something infinitely complex and absolutely simple. For her, in the Book of Revelation, the 'things of the world' that would pass away, 'heaven and earth rolled up like a scroll,' were demonstrations of the inevitable movement from mass to energy. Her uncle, her beloved mother's beloved brother, had been a scientist. She was an intelligent woman, and somewhere in the middle of the insane theology and the brutal politics, the flamboyant depression and the refusal of books, of knowledge, of life, she had watched the atomic bomb go off and realised that the true nature of the world is energy not mass. But she never understood that energy could have been her own true nature while she was alive. She did not need to be trapped in mass.”