Holiness Quotes

Character that is fruit-producing can be summed up in the mastery of these 5 qualities: morals, but a sense of humor; love, but respect for criticism; intelligence without pretense; humility without self-loathing; and a mind open, but with solid convictions.

~ Criss Jami

Angels are good not simply because they see bad as bad, but also because they see bad as corny.

~ Criss Jami

To be intuitive is to possess a godly characteristic: to be bad at second-guessing the good.

~ Criss Jami

Holiness is as much about what you do on a Monday morning on the factory floor as it is about what you do on a Sunday morning in a church gathering. Holiness is as much about the kind of neighbour you are as it is about the kind of church member you are. It is as much about who you are when you are holding a steering wheel as who you are when you are holding a Bible.

~ Tim Chester

The pleasure of sins is pain in the soul.

~ Lailah Gifty

What's simple is that everything good comes from God, and everything bad comes from man. Where it gets complicated is that everything seemingly good but ultimately bad comes from man, and everything seemingly bad but ultimately good comes from God.

~ Criss Jami

Some days you feel like you're the worst of sinners, others like you're the most righteous person on earth. I am convinced that the former is when you're closest to God.

~ Criss Jami

Reject sin, seek righteousness.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Make your body a holy temple.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

To choose holiness is to reject sin.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The holiness of the gospel is its ability to pierced though the heart.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Holiness begins in our minds and works out to our actions. This being true, what we allow to enter our minds is critically important. The television programs we watch, the movies we may attend, the books and magazines we read, the music we listen to, and the conversations we have all affect our minds.

~ Jerry Bridges

Man's delight in the Lord is the absolute peak of human triumph. He praises God when full of joy, and when not, he praises God to become full of joy. For to know and to live as though God is worthy of all praise, in all one's circumstances, whether seemingly good or seemingly bad, is the primary definition of joy and the richest triumph for man under God.

~ Criss Jami

The holiness of God makes Him the possessor of all earthly wealth, which belongs to Him forever

~ Sunday Adelaja

Never look at how others who live dishonestly become rich, look at God and His holiness

~ Sunday Adelaja

God’s constant wealth is accessible to us, if we cultivate His holiness in our lives

~ Sunday Adelaja

Holiness is God's special gift to His people who believe in the finished work of Jesus Christ on the Cross. Holiness is the everyday work of the Holy Spirit in the heart and life of believers.

~ Pazaria Smith

To esteem what makes you holy over what makes you happy - that is the greatest dare.

~ Criss Jami

Why would we want fame, when God promises us glory? Why would we be seeking the wealth of the world when the wealth of heaven is ours? Why would we run for a crown that will perish with time, when we're called to win a crown that is imperishable?

~ Paul David Washer

He does not want a girl who trifles with Christianity. He wants a woman who is radically given to Christ. He does not want a girl who prays tepid, lukewarm prayers. He wants a woman who lives in defiance of the powers of Hell. He does not want a girl who is self-adorning with the latest fashions and trends. He wants a woman who is adorned with the inner jewelry of Christ-given holiness. He does not want a girl who dishonors and belittles her parents. He wants a woman who honors the authorities God has placed in her life and serves them with charity and gladness. He does not want a girl whose Bible is an accessory to her wardrobe. He wants a woman whose hunger and thirst is to know the Lord, and who diligently feasts upon His Word. He does not want a girl whose tongue is a deceptive weapon of selfishness. He wants a woman whose words drip with the honey of the name of Jesus.

~ Leslie Ludy

My tears were wiped away, my heart was strong, I saw the way of healing…I said, “God help me now to preach the Word to all the dying around, and tell them how ‘tis Satan still defiles, and Jesus still delivers, for He is just the same today.

~ John Alexander Dowie

What is sin? All wrong doing is a sin.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The Lord God must be greatly feared! We can’t stand his wrath.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

God is spirit. The spirit dwells in a body. We are the Holy temple.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The path of holiness is a path of light.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Holiness has to do with more than mere acts. Our motives must be holy, that is, arising from a desire to do something simply because it is the will of God. Our thoughts should be holy, since they are known to God even before they are formed in our minds.

~ Jerry Bridges

Conscious minds can, at the most, comprehend that the whole idea of a 'God' is his superiority, his omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience; and therefore, at the least, desire him, someone far greater than themselves.

~ Criss Jami

And those of us who trust ourselves the least,Who doubt and question most, these, it may be,Will make their mark upon eternity,And youth will turn to them as to a feast.The time may come when a man who confessedHis self-doubts will be ranked among the blessedWho never suffered anguish or knew fear,Whose times were times of glory and good cheer,Who lived like children, simple happy lives.For in us too is part of that Eternal MindWhich through the aeons calls to brothers of its kind:Both you and I will pass, but it survives.

~ Hermann Hesse

Sadly enough, some people are insecure in such a way that they cannot bear the thought of the sovereignty of God, the thought of His Being as greater than themselves. It makes them feel insignificant. But I know if I were to worship and obey anything, I would like it far greater than myself or any person or human system, preferably to the point that which it, perhaps, in all its majesty, makes me feel lost and even 'creatural' in my sheer humanity. Only this God - He who is great beyond human measure, yet still considers His creation precious - I find to be more than worthy of praise; otherwise, I bow down and worship nothing. And if the thought of such a superior and almighty God were to indeed offend me, I would have to remember that it is because I am only as significant as the things which I am idolizing, things which are ultimately separating me, the creation, from my original Creator.

~ Criss Jami

God is not a God of confusion, although at times one's judgment, for a period, may become clouded in the mi(d)st of one's growth process. I stopped fooling myself into thinking that Christ is always for the cool kids and never for those upright and uptight religious people everybody hates.

~ Criss Jami

A utopian system, when established by men, is likely to be synonymous with a dystopian depression. The only way for perfect peace by man is absolute control of all wrongs. Bully-cultures find this: with each and every mistake, another village idiot is shamed into nothingness and mindlessly shut down by the herd. This is a superficial peace made by force and by fear, one in which there is no freedom to breathe; and the reason it is impossible for man to maintain freedom and peace for everyone at the same time. Christ, on the other hand, transforms, instead of controls, by instilling his certain inner peace. This is the place where one realizes that only his holiness is and feels like true freedom, rather than like imprisonment, and, too, why Hell, I imagine, a magnified version of man's never-ending conflict between freedom and peace, would be the flesh's ultimate utopia - yet its ultimate regret.

~ Criss Jami

People debate over whether or not there is a literal Hell, in the literal sense often described as fire and eternal torture, which, to many, seems to be too harsh a punishment. If men really want to fear something, they should be fearing separation from God, the supposedly more comforting alternative to a literal Hell. For separation from the authorship of love, mercy, and goodness is the ultimate torture. If you think a literal Hell sounds too bad, you are very much underestimating the pain of being absolutely, wholly separated from the goodness while exposed to the reality of the holiness of God.

~ Criss Jami

The Christian living in disobedience also lives devoid of joy and hope. But when he begins to understand that Christ has delivered him from the reign of sin, when he begins to see that he is united to Him who has all power and authority and that it is possible to walk in obedience, he begins to have hope, and as he hopes in Christ, he begins to have joy. In the strength of this joy, he begins to overcome the sins that have so easily entangle him. He then finds that the joy of a holy walk is infinitely more satisfying than the fleeting pleasures of sin. But to experience this joy, we must make some choices. We must choose to forsake sin, not only because it is defeating to us but because it grieves the heart of God.

~ Jerry Bridges

Those small moments of pleasure men get from sin, from defying God, are perhaps grace - His final gift still to those who hard-heartedly choose to deny Him. Godless men may blatantly enjoy offending God not because they are free-spirited, but on the whole because He moves them to enjoy it. Sin is, in a sense, still touching God: for a strike involves a touch. Perhaps this is His divine kindness. Faithful men find everlasting fulfillment in His good company; but godless men who strike at the Author of Joy, who are completely ignorant of the greater, for them - and by God's love for His enemies - there is yet this small recoil known as 'pleasure' before the fall.

~ Criss Jami

God loves each person, I believe; although, just like we do in our private homes, He reserves His kingdom only for those whom He enjoys.

~ Criss Jami

We are above all things loved--that is the good news of the gospel--and loved not just the way we turn up on Sundays in our best clothes and on our best behavior and with our best feet forward, but loved as we alone know ourselves to be, the weakest and shabbiest of what we are along with the strongest and gladdest. To come together as people who believe that just maybe this gospel is actually true should be to come together like people who have just won the Irish Sweepstakes. It should have us throwing our arms around each other like people who have just discovered that every single man and woman in those pews is not just another familiar or unfamiliar face but is our long-lost brother and our long-lost sister because despite the fact that we have all walked in different gardens and knelt at different graves, we have all, humanly speaking, come from the same place and are heading out into the same blessed mystery that awaits us all. This is the joy that is so apt to be missing, and missing not just from church but from our own lives--the joy of not just managing to believe at least part of the time that it is true that life is holy, but of actually running into that holiness head-on.

~ Frederick Buechner

Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.

~ Peter Matthiessen

In his first summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for nearly an hour in his sandbox in the orchard, as doves and redwings came and went on the warm wind, the leaves dancing, the clouds flying…the child was not observing; he was at rest in the very center of the universe, a part of things, unaware of endings and beginning, still in unison with the primordial nature of creation, letting all light and phenomena pour through.

~ Peter Matthiessen

You know how they say a holy man falls seven times and gets back up? he asked, quoting the Hebrew phrase, the ancient words flying smoothly off his tongue. I nodded. I always think that it isn't the persistence that makes him holy but the fact that he fell. His eyes sparkled with passion as he spoke. You can't really commit to being religious, to loving God, if you haven't spent some time with your face in the dirt.

~ Leah Vincent

John Bunyan says that he never forgot the divinity he taught, because it was burnt into him when he was on his knees. That is the way to learn the gospel. If you learn it upon your knees you will never unlearn it. That which “men” teach you, men can unteach you – if I am merely convinced by reason, a better reasoner may deceive me. If I merely hold my doctrinal opinions because they seem “to me” to be correct, I may be led to think differently another day. But if “God” has taught them to me – he who is himself pure truth – I have not learned amiss, but I have so learned that I shall never unlearn, nor shall I forget.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon