Hans Urs von Balthasar Quotes

Jesus is much more concerned about shaking your foundations, giving you an utterly alternative self image, world image, and God image, and thus reframing your entire reality. Mere inspiration can never do this.

I have a dream that America will pray and God will forgive us our sins.

Standing at a Christian music festival in Asbury, Ky., in the spring of 1978, I gave my life to Jesus Christ, and that's changed everything.

Repentance will not make you see Christ; but to see Christ will give you repentance.

You can receive Christ into your heart, and he can bring joy, and a thrill, and glory such as you have never known - if you will give your life to him.

I believe that a great number of people are going to die and go to hell because they’re counting on their religiosity in the church instead of their relationship with Jesus to get them to heaven. They give lip service to repentance and faith, but they’ve never been born again.

Those who have been touched by forgiveness and new life and have thus entered into God's rule become, like Jesus, bearers of that rule.

Despair of ever being saved, "except thou be born again," or of seeing God "without holiness," or of having part in Christ except thou "love him above father, mother, or thy own life." This kind of despair is one of the first steps to heaven.

It is only the Lord who is able to give [unbelievers] repentance and recover them out of Satan's snare.

Faith is this extraordinary principle which links man to God; faith is this thing that keeps a man from hell and puts him in heaven; it is the connection between this world and the world to come; faith is this mystic astounding thing that can take a man dead in trespasses and sins and make him live as a new being, a new man in Christ Jesus.

I have seen miracles in my time, my brothers and sisters. The greatest miracle of all, I believe, is the transformation that comes into the life of a man or a woman who accepts the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and tries to live it in his or her life.

[Salvation] is a curious process of divine burglary. The first thing to be wrested from one by a God who said 'Thou shalt not steal' is one's good opinion of one's self.

Entrance into Heaven is not at the hour of death, but at the moment of conversion.

Open your hearts to the Lord. The Lord is waiting for you and the Church will welcome you if your willingness to serve good is as clear and public as your choice to serve evil was.

The Christian faith, simply stated, reminds us that our fundamental problem is not moral; rather, our fundamental problem is spiritual. It is not just that we are immoral, but that a moral life alone cannot bridge what separates us from God. Herein lies the cardinal difference between the moralizing religions and Jesus' offer to us. Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive.

The gospel doesn't make bad people good, it makes dead people alive.

In coming to Christ we don't bring our old life up to a higher plane; we leave it at the cross.

Salvation, the prophets tell us, is preconditioned by repentance. The redeeming act of God waits upon man's initiative.

Repentance is a gift of God's grace.

The Bible, which ranges over a period of four thousand years, records but one instance of a death-bed conversion (the thief on the cross) - one that none may despair, and but one that none may presume.

Jesus raised the standard high so we would realize we couldn’t possibly do it without a savior.

The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did.

I think one day Madonna's going to say Jesus is Lord, one day Muhammad is going to say Jesus is Lord, Hitler will say Jesus is Lord.

By the help of the water of new birth, the stain of former years had been washed away, and a light from above, serene and pure, had been infused into my reconciled heart, — after that, by the agency of the Spirit breathed from heaven, a second birth had restored me to a new man.