Bible Study Quotes

“Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.”
― Bernard Branson

“The most important thing we can pray about for others is that they will know God better and that He will help them understand His will, grow in spiritual wisdom, and live lives that honor Him. We can pray that they will become more like Him and bear the fruit of His Spirit.”
― Stormie Omartian, The Power of a Praying® Woman Bible: Prayer and Study Helps by Stormie Omartian

“Real faith comes when you facing a problem you can't help, you can't change, and you can't work it out”
― Cynthia A. Patterson, It Had to Happen

“The Holy Scriptures are to be read constantly, memorized, treated as more important than gold and silver. We should esteem the Scriptures more than our daily food. God's Words should be our delight and hope.”
― Greg Gordon, Principles for the Gathering of Believers Under the Headship of Jesus Christ

“If you think about it, a book is like food for your mind. When you look at it that way, a novel could be like a cupcake. But it could also be a pot roast, or a chicken salad, or a vegetable salad. In this case, reading a book is also like eating food. And, simply put: Eating food is often a delicious activity. And reading a book is often a delightful activity.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“I want people to fill their minds with passages of Scripture while they are well and strong, that they may have sure help in the day of need. I want them to be diligent in studying their Bibles, and becoming familiar with their contents, in order that the grand old Book may stand by them and talk with them when all earthly friends fail.”
― J.C. Ryle

“The famous ritual of Jesus washing the feet of his male disciples (John 13 : 1–11). After taking his clothes off (yes, he strips) and tying a towel around his waist, Jesus does something that only slaves and women did in his culture, something that “real men” never did: he washes other peoples’ feet. More provocatively still, it is this unmanly or womanly act, he teaches, that signals both his own divinity and the way he wants his own disciples to live. As Jennings has it, “Jesus’s ‘divine’ identity thus is expressed in his disregard for the most intimately enforced institutions of worldly society: gender role expectations.” Not everyone, of course, is pleased with such a queer act: “Jesus stripping naked and washing the feet of his friends,” Jennings reminds us, is “something that Peter at least regards as quite unseemly.” Dale Martin makes a very similar point: although “Jesus allows a woman to wash his feet (and we biblical scholars— who know our Hebrew—recognize the hint [foot penis]), when it is his turn, he takes his clothes off, wraps a towel around his waist, and washes the feet of his male disciples, again taking time out for a special seduction of Peter.” Modern readers, then, may be blind to the gendered and sexual meanings of such acts, but the original participants certainly were not, nor are our contemporary gnostic scholars.”
― Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion

“Please visit my Patreon page called Seed Of Faith Ministries as that is where a majority of my writing is. You can also go to zeno fm and search for my radio station called Christian Love Radio or you can go to blogger and check out my blog called Seed Of Faith”
― Adriel Montejano

“The freedom to think for ourselves, to weigh all of the evidence carefully, to make up our own minds without being pressured, is essential to genuine faith. One of the primary marks of a cult is the denial of this freedom by various tricks of persuasion so that eventually the cult member has surrendered his autonomy to the point that the “guru” or “prophet” does the thinking for him. Unfortunately, almost any church can, either wittingly or unwittingly, exert the same kind of pressure so that members conform to group thinking rather than coming to a carefully-thought-out conclusion themselves.
-- Chapter 5 --Unbelief Has Many Faces, page 84.”
― Dave Hunt, Beyond Seduction: A Return to Biblical Christianity

“Character is worth more than anything else in the whole wide world.”
― Dwight L. Moody, Daniel, Man of God: Being a Man of Character in a Babylon World

“How wonderful it is to know that we go through no experiences where God is not there in divine companionship, and the hotter the fire the sweeter the fellowship. You know, I can tell you, folks, in my own experience, that whenever I get into a situation where I decide to take a stand for something and it’s the unpopular thing to do, and you start getting flack, you have this tremendous sense of divine companionship. It’s what Peter talked about when he talked about the fact that when we go through persecution, the Spirit of grace and glory rests on us. I had this overwhelming sense of the presence of God strengthening. And here they were in the fiery furnace in divine companionship.

- Uncompromising Faith in the Fiery Furnace, Part 2 (Sermon)”
― John F. MacArthur Jr.

“The chronology of John is so totally at odds with that of the Synoptics (not that they always agree among themselves) that we must suppose John's itinerary of Jesus to be governed solely by the theological demands of any particular scene. For example, Matthew, Mark, and Luke have Jesus, by implication, active for about a year's worth of ministry and teaching in Galilee, after which he embarks on the fatal visit to Jerusalem for Passover. But John has Jesus going to Jerusalem and back several times. For Matthew, the Jerusalem crowds on Palm Sunday have to inquire of the Galileans who Jesus is, but John's Jerusalemites know him well enough. And John has Jesus present at three Passover feasts, giving us our traditional estimate of a three-year ministry. But is John just constructing a Passover scene whenever he wants to have Jesus return to Passover themes in his teaching? Likewise, in the Synoptics, the Last Supper takes place on Thursday, the crucifixion on Friday, but not in John, where Jesus must die on Thursday, like the Passover lamb he typologically embodies.”
― Robert M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition?

“As Strauss demonstrated with inescapable lucidity many decades ago, the two nativity stories of Matthew and Luke disagree at almost every point, one exception being the location of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem. [...] Matthew assumes Jesus was born in the home of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem, and that they only relocated to Nazareth in Galilee after taking off for Egypt to avoid Herod the Great's persecution. Luke knows nothing of this but instead presupposes that Mary and Joseph lived in Galilee and "happened" to be in Bethlehem when the hour struck for Jesus' birth because the Holy Couple had to be there to register for a Roman taxation census. [...] For the moment, my point is to suggest that Luke and Matthew both seem to have been winging it, just as they did with their genealogies. They began with an assumption and tried to connect the dots. This time, their common assumption was that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Whence this assumption? Was there historical memory that Jesus was born there? Hardly; if there had been, we cannot account for Mark's utter lack of knowledge of the fact. No, it seems much more natural, much less contrived, to suggest that Matthew and Luke alike simply inferred from their belief in Jesus' Davidic lineage that he must have been born in Bethlehem. [...] Matthew and Luke both placed the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem because they mistakenly thought prophecy demanded it. They went to work trying to connect the dots with narrative or historical verisimilitude, but with limited success.”
― Robert M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition?

“The 144,000 have the patience of the saints; they keep the commandments of God, and they also have the faith of Jesus. For them the doors of heaven will swing wide open. They enter as those who have a right to the tree of life, and with holy boldness they go with Jesus even into the presence of God. In this group God completes the demonstration of His power to save. The vilest sinners can be made fit companions for the saints in light. If these persons chosen from the last and weakest generation can endure the test given them, there is no excuse for the fall of Adam. He, in the fullness of strength, failed in the smallest test; these, in all the weakness of humanity, pass a test infinitely greater. Hence, God cannot be accused of requiring more of Adam than he could do.
God is now looking for candidates for immortality. He is looking for men and women to make up the number required in the last demonstration. He wants converted, sanctified, dedicated people, such as will not boast of their attainments, but who in humility will follow in the Master's footsteps, exercise the faith He did, have the patience needed to finish the work, and at last enter with Him through the gates into the city.”
― M.L. Andreasen, Book of Hebrews, The

“That is not the only trajectory along which the baptism narrative grew and evolved. The Markan version itself began to afford new embarrassments as Christian history progressed. After all, John's was a baptism for repenting sinners! What on earth was Jesus doing there? [...] Apparently, Mark saw nothing amiss. After all, it is a good thing to repent, isn't it? The same humility that led Jesus to wade into the Jordan that day also bade him deflect the polite flattery of a wellwisher in Mark 10:17-18. "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone!" Needless to say, the thought never entered Mark's head that Jesus might be an incarnation of God. That is a later stage of Christology, and when theologians arrived there, Mark 10:17-18 became a headache for which no cure has yet been found.”
― Robert M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition?

“The average reader of the New Testament reads Matthew before Mark and then goes on to Luke and John. Matthew gives him the impression that Jesus was born God's Son in a miraculous fashion. Mark begins only with the baptism, but the reader will think little of this: perhaps Mark begins in medias res. With Luke we are back to a miraculous nativity for one born the Son of God. In John the reader learns that Jesus had already been God's Son from all eternity. But suppose one read Mark by itself, as its first readers did. What impression would one receive? Surely in a book where the main character shows up as an adult and, right off the bat, experiences a vision of divine calling in which he and no one else is told that he is God's Son, the natural inference would be that the baptism was the beginning of an honorific Sonship. If he were already God's son, wouldn't he have known it? And then why should God tell him what he already knew? It seems that Mark might believe what others in the early church did, namely, in Jesus' adoptive Sonship. Ebionite Jewish Christians and Cerinthian (also Jewish) Gnostics were adoptionists, rejecting any miraculous generation of Jesus Christ from the deity. [...] Once we know this was a popular, though eventually controversial, option among early Christians, it begins to make a new sense that the earliest gospel, Mark, sounds adoptionist but is flanked and overwhelmed by subsequent gospels that have moved the Sonship further and further back, attributing to Jesus some degree of divine nature in the process.”
― Robert M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition?

“The Synoptic gospels agree that after being baptized, Jesus was driven by the Spirit, to which he was newly sensitive, out into the desert to be tested or tempted (same Greek word) by Satan. [...] "Satan," originally not a proper name but a title, "the Adversary," was a servant of God, a kind of security chief who occasionally urged the Almighty to take a second look at his favorites about whose character the Satan harbored some doubts. [...] Thus, in the Gospels it seems only natural that Jesus, newly commissioned as God's Son, should be put through his paces by the Satan to determine whether he is really up to the job. That is the point of the taunt, "If you are the Son of God...." Does Jesus understand what that entails? In the same way, Luke will later (22:31-32) portray Satan, again in character, as demanding, as is his right, to sift the twelve disciples like wheat, the same task as the Baptist ascribes to the Coming One, and they fail the test. Peter unwittingly acts the role of the Adversary when he tests Jesus' resolve to go forward with the crucifixion (Mark 8:32-33). Satan becomes the enemy of God and the champion of evil only insofar as he becomes mixed with other ancient characters like Beelzebul the Ekronite oraclegod (Matt. 12:24, 26; 2 Kings 1:2), Leviathan the Chaos Dragon (Ps. 74:13-14; Rev. 12:3 ff.), and Ahriman the Zoroastrian antigod (2 Cor. 4:4; Luke 10:17-19).”
― Robert M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition?

“It is also striking and worth noting that this apocalyptic message comes to be toned down, and then virtually eliminated, and finally preached against (allegedly by Jesus!) in our later sources. And it is not hard to figure out why. If Jesus predicted that the imminent apocalypse would arrive within his own generation, before his disciples had all died, what was one to think a generation later when in fact it had not arrived? One might conclude that Jesus was wrong. But if one wanted to stay true to him, one might change the message that he proclaimed so that he no longer spoke about the coming apocalypse. So it is no accident that our final canonical Gospel, John, written after that first generation, no longer has Jesus proclaim an apocalyptic message. He preaches something else entirely. Even later, in a book like the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus preaches directly against an apocalyptic point of view (sayings 2, 113). As time went on, the apocalyptic message came to be seen as misguided, or even dangerous. And so the traditions of Jesus’s preaching were changed. But in our earliest multiply attested sources, there it is for all to see.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God

“The Gospel of Mark has some major shortcomings: It contains no birth narrative; it implies that Jesus, a repentant sinner, became the Son of God only at his baptism; it recounts no resurrection appearances; and it ends with the very unsatisfactory notion that the women who found the Empty Tomb were too afraid to speak to anyone about it. Moreover, Mark includes very little of Jesus' teachings; worse yet, (from Matthew's point of view) he even misunderstood totally the purpose of Jesus' use of parables. Indeed, by the last two decades of the first century, Mark's theology seemed already old-fashioned and even slightly suggestive of heresy. So, working apparently without knowledge of each other, within perhaps twenty or thirty years after Mark, two authors (or Christian groups), now known to us as "Matthew" and "Luke" (and even a third, in the view of some-"John') set about rewriting and correcting the first unsatisfactory Gospel.”
― Alan Dundes University of California, Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore

“The goal of every serious Bible study should not be to simply know the Scriptures, but to apply them.”
― Curtis Ferrell, Dual Citizenship: Living as a Christian in America

“For it is established by God's Word that God does not lie, nor does His word lie.”
― Martin Luther

“How can you trust God who is not true to his word? Isn’t that what the Bible is?

Because God is larger than a platitude. A platitude is sweet, concise, and fits on a throw pillow. God is larger than that. With the sufferings in my life, I need more than a platitude. I need this Larger Story God I’ve come to know.”
― Brenda Seefeldt Amodea, Trust Issues With God: Because Life Is Unfair: Bible Study, With Video Access

“He was a bit of a rabble-rouser. A gadfly. The Son of Man had a mischievous side. You don't get crucified for being a people pleaser.”
― John Mark Comer

“Truly, it was at my darkest that Jesus felt nearest. It was in my sorrow that the Man of Sorrows stood by me. It was in my wordless groanings that our High Priest interceded for me. It was in my aimless wanderings that my Good Shepherd sought me. It was in my defenselessness that the Lion of Judah roared His protection over me.

It was in that dark night of the soul that the theological truths I'd learned about Jesus as a little girl in Sunday School took on real flesh-and-blood meaning for me.

I wouldn't choose the darkness again, but I won't waste it either.”
― Asheritah Ciuciu, Delighting in Jesus: Rhythms to Restore Joy When You Feel Burdened, Broken, or Burned-Out

“You must read the scriptures yourself to know its pure words.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“If our reading of the Bible focuses our eyes on anyone other than God, we have gotten backwards the transformation process.
(ch. 1)”
― Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds

“You can trust the divine words written as Holy Scriptures.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Since I began seeking God first, joy and peace have stopped being things I long for but are blessings I now experience. No matter what’s going on in my life or the world.”
― Anita Keagy, Seeking God First: A Practical Plan for Finding Joy and Peace in Him

“To be able to honestly say, ‘I am seeking God,’ a believer needs to move beyond giving God mere nods of notice. She must actively, continuously, and persistently express a real desire to know Him by thoroughly anchoring herself in Scripture.”
― Anita Keagy, Seeking God First: A Practical Plan for Finding Joy and Peace in Him

“Never doubt in the dark what God told you in the light.”
― Anita Keagy, Seeking God First: A Practical Plan for Finding Joy and Peace in Him