Blessed to be with God

“Nyafulu credits her progress and achievements to her willful dependence on God. She is keenly aware of this reliance and of God’s intimate presence in life’s daily moments, and she helps others in her orbit to experience the same.”

“God hates our false worship but not because he's, he's hung up and he has emotional needs...He hates it because we are less alive when we do that.”

“When you're rooted in God you're in the place of life, listen, even when life becomes unbearable, even when life becomes terrible, even when you fail, you're rooted in that source of life which is God”

“It was not just that the gospel was making demands on me. It was also giving support. Not that the support was always easy to recognise.”

“God stands with those who lack the basic good things of life. And since God is concerned about them, then Jesus tells us that we should be concerned as well.”

“the Christian life is a life lived in accordance with the values of the coming Kingdom of Heaven...we stand out because our way of life is from the future, and is therefore both timely and timeless at the same time.”

“Many were destitute, hungry, mourning and despised by the local population. At the economic level they are certainly not blessed. Yet Luke calls them blessed!”

“To be able to love and accept ourselves, to give someone else the support of love and maybe some guidance if it is needed...is to bring a kind of healing that is very real and very important. It may not be spectacular but it can still be a miracle.”

“To put this all in another way: Blessed are we who are rich, who are filled, who have reason to laugh. But woe to us if we keep such gifts only for ourselves.”

“For God's people, then and now, being called blessed isn't about making someone else jealous or establishing that you're more well off than another”

“all of us go through periods of our life where we feel in some sense or another poor, hungry, weeping, insulted, discarded. And God wants us to know that in those moments we are valued.”

“It is through transcending the trappings of this material world that we live in that we are truly blessed in finding our ultimate reward in Christ Jesus and the Kingdom of God”

“Jesus on the cross is the picture of the blessed one. Why? Because he is hooked on to the will of God which is the ultimate good. Jesus on the cross is the sign of the blessed life.”

“The beatitudes are a call not to prudent and respectable living, but to unwavering discipleship”

“It is significant that Jeremiah’s oracle does not say that the “one who trusts in the Lord” will not experience heat or drought, but rather that he will stay green in the midst of it”

“because we are people of the resurrection, we are called to love in the way God loves, by uniting ourselves to God’s love–and living with whatever the consequences of that turn out to be”

“I remember what happened to the four children of the poor widow who died of Hepatitis – her brother Charles and his wife Gloria took in the children – even as poor as they are. God bless people like that! Such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“The message of the beatitudes then is this: if you do everything for the sake of the Son of Man, even to the point of suffering worldly pains, you are already a saint. And that is a cause for leaping and rejoicing”

“Are you ordering your life so as to be popular with everybody? Trust me, if you speak God's truth you will necessarily annoy some people. So how blessed are you if you're not hung up on the approbation of the fickle crowd.”

“the heart, your deepest center, the organizing principle of your life needs to be grounded, not in those ephemeral passing states of mind but in God”

“The only source of real spiritual vitality is the Lord God. When you're planted in him you grow and you thrive even during the toughest times.”