Houses Of Worship Quotes

It was the hard work of our people, the freedom they enjoyed and their faith in God that built this country and made it the envy of the world. In all of our great cities and towns evidence of the faith of our people is found: houses of worship of every denomination are among the oldest structures. While never willing to bow to a tyrant, our forefathers were always willing to get to their knees before God. When catastrophe threatened, they turned to God for deliverance. When the harvest was bountiful the first thought was thanksgiving to God. ~ Ronald Reagan

Where did secular liberalism go wrong?

It has been undone by its own ideas. The first idea is that matters of conscience - religion, ethics, and values - are private matters. The privatizing of conscience started with two important principles: religion should be separated from the state and people should not be forced to believe one way or the other. But it went further to say that belief has no place in the public sphere. Conscience belongs in homes and houses of worship, not in the marketplace. By making conscience private, secular liberals had hoped to prevent believers from introducing sectarian beliefs into politics. But of course they couldn't, since freedom of belief means believers are free to speak their minds in public.

Instead, secularism imposed a gag order on itself. Because "private" is equated with "personal" and "subjective," questions of conscience were placed out of bounds of serious critical evaluation.

…

… The mistake lies in thinking that because conscience is free from coercion, it must be free from criticism, reason, truth, or independent, objective standards of right and wrong. The indispensable principle of freedom of belief has mutated into an unthinking assumption that matters of belief are immune to critical public inquiry and shared evaluative norms. ~ Austin Dacey

And although I no longer identified with the stringency or dogma of organized Christian religion, I remained drawn to the compassion and sense of community that still existed in houses of worship. ~ Emily Rapp

Gospel bands should take note: More musical equipment is stolen from churches than from clubs or concert halls. For this reason, musicians should be careful leaving instruments unattended in houses of worship. ~ Attorney Rich Stim

Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or the government.

Hope does not mean we will reform Wall Street swindlers and speculators.

Hope does not mean that the nation's ministers and rabbis, who know the words of the great Hebrew prophets, will leave their houses of worship to practice the religious beliefs they preach. Most clerics like fine, abstract words about justice and full collection plates, but know little of real hope.

Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope.

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something.

Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope does not believe in force. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on us all.

Hope sees in our enemy our own face.

Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with ~ Chris Hedges

I had seen buildings burn before, as part of my training and as part of my childhood. I had seen small homes and enormous mansions devoured by fire, and I had seen flames destroy factories and symphony halls and houses of worship. A school seems worse, I thought as the fire roared into the sky. Even when the school is empty, it's a terrible thing. ~ Lemony Snicket

As a preacher who has spent significant time in churches and houses of worship all across the country, I can tell you firsthand that religious liberty and freedom are principles that can never be infringed upon. ~ Al Sharpton

Libraries are like houses of worship: Whether or not you use them yourself, it's important to know that they are there. In many ways they define a society and the values of that society. Librarians to me are the keepers of the flame of knowledge. When I was growing up, the librarian in my local library looked like a meek little old lady, but after you spent some time with her, you realized she was Athena with a sword, a wise and wonderful repository of wisdom. ~ Jane Stanton Hitchcock

Doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions? ~ Martin Amis

IN SHAME AND SORROW CHRISTIANS KEEP IN MEMORY THE JEWISH CITIZENS OF THIS CITY. IN 1933, 4675 JEWS LIVED IN DRESDEN. IN 1945 IT WAS 70. WE WERE SILENT AS THEIR HOUSES OF WORSHIP BLAZED . . . WE DID NOT RECOGNIZE THEM AS OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS. WE ASK FOR FORGIVENESS. ~ Lauren Belfer

For all the allure of speciously stress-free suburbs, for all the grinding of city life, cities endure. And when all those diverse energies are harnessed, and those choices, private and public, cohere, and all the bargains made in a million ways every day hold up, then a city flourishes and is the most stimulating center for life, and the most precious artifact, a culture can create. Think of great cities large and small (size, as with any work of art, does not necessarily determine value) and, in addition to nodes of government, commerce, law, hospitals, libraries, and newspapers will come to mind, as will restaurants and theaters and houses of worship and museums and opera houses and galleries and universities. And so will stadia and arenas and parks. In short, once finds not simply commerce but culture, not simply work but leisure, not only negotium but otium, not simply that which ennobles but also that which perfects us. Such has forever been the ultimate purpose of a city, to mirror our higher state, not simply to shelter us from wind and rain. As with leisure, so with the city: It is the setting to make us not the best that Nature can make us, but to manifest the best we, humankind, adding Art to Nature, can make us. ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

Our First Amendment rights are not given to us by the government but are rights we inherently possess. The government cannot use subsequent amendments to limit First Amendment rights. The Free Exercise Clause is both an individual and a collective liberty protecting a right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience. Therefore, we strongly support the freedom of Americans to act in accordance with their religious beliefs, not only in their houses of worship, but also in their everyday lives. ~ Republican Party

In this country of the bountiful harvest, everyone can have enough to eat - we have it! We grow enough for everyone. Let's share it by supporting our local foodbanks, houses of worship and organizations who help people. ~ Catherine Hicks

Many seducers clutter the simple message of the gospel with legalistic additions, with convoluted attempts to legitimize moral compromise, and with psychological theories that turn churches into relational support groups instead of houses of worship. ~ Charles R. Swindoll

Though they control scores of industrial, commercial, mining and tourist corporations, not one bears the name Rothschild. Being private partnerships, the family houses never need to, and never do, publish a single public balance sheet, or any other report of their financial condition. ~ Frederic Morton

Demons lie behind much of the world's pagan worship systems. ~ Max Anders

Living for your purpose is equivalent to living for the Kingdom of God ~ Sunday Adelaja

God is the greatest thing that exists, ever has existed or ever will ... for us to glory in anything else, would be sin, as there is nothing greater than God, there is no calling greater than praising God. ~ John Piper

The more God-centered our worship practices, the more mercy-centered our life. ~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

And I see the houses of the human race perched on the edge of the sea, shipwrecked in their false neighborliness. ~ Italo Calvino

Real consciousness is touch. Thought is getting out of touch.

The crux of the whole problem lies here, in the duality of man's consciousness. Touch, the being in touch, is the basis of all consciousness, and it is the basis of enduring happiness. Thought is a secondary form of consciousness, Mind is a secondary form of existence, a getting out of touch, a standing clear, in order to come to a better adjustment in touch.

Man, poor man, has to learn to function in these two ways of consciousness. When a man is in touch, he is non-mental, his mind is quiescent, his bodily centres are active. When a man's mind is active in real mental activity, the bodily centres are quiescent, switched off, the man is out of touch. The animals remain always in touch. And man, poor modern man, with his worship of his own god, which is his own mind glorified, is permanently out of touch. To be always irrevocably in touch is to feel sometimes imprisoned. But to be permanently out of touch is at last excruciatingly painful, it is a state of being nothing, and being nowhere, and at the same time being conscious and capable of extreme discomfort and ennui. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The day will one day come--or what of the long-promised kingdom of heaven?--when a woman, instead of spending anxious thought on the adornment of her own outward person, will seek with might the adornment of the inward soul of another, and will make that her crown of rejoicing. Nay, are there none such even now? The day will come when a man, rather than build a great house for the overflow of a mighty hospitality, will give himself, in the personal labor of outgoing love, to build spiritual houses like St. Paul--a higher art than any of man's invention. O my brother, what were it not for thee to have a hand in making thy brother beautiful! ~ George MacDonald

It is winter now,
and the roses are blooming again,
their petals bright against the snow.
My father died last April;
my sisters no longer write,
except at the turning of the year,
content with their fine houses
and their grandchildren.
Beast and I
putter in the gardens
and walk slowly on the forest paths.
[from the poem, Beauty and the Beast: An Anniversary] ~ Jane Yolen

If I or my soldiers have plundered or done injury to the houses or ministers of religion, I repent me of my sin; but it is not of Edward of England I shall ask pardon. ~ William Wallace

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our
spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of
artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver
behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity
has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship
the spine and its tingle. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The light by which we see in this world comes out from the soul of the observer. Wherever any noble sentiment dwelt, it made the faces and houses around to shine. Nay, the powers of this busy brain are miraculous and illimitable. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

As those that pull down private houses adjoining to the temples of the gods, prop up such parts as are contiguous to them; so, in undermining bashfulness, due regard is to be had to adjacent modesty, good-nature and humanity. ~ Plutarch

What, are there masques? Hear you me, Jessica:
Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum
And the vile squealing of the wry-neck'd fife,
Clamber not you up to the casements then,
Nor thrust your head into the public street
To gaze on Christian fools with varnish'd faces,
But stop my house's ears, I mean my casements:
Let not the sound of shallow foppery enter
~ William Shakespeare

To enjoy worship for its own sake, or simply out of a cultural appreciation of the 'performance' (whether of Byrd or heavy rock), would be like Moses coming upon the burning bush and deciding to cook his lunch on it. ~ N.T. Wright

All worship is shot wrong that is not directed to, and conducted by, the thoughts of the power of God, whose assistance we need. ~ Stephen Charnock

This wasn't music to dance to - it was music to worship, music to fill in the gaps of my soul, to bring me to a place where there was no pain. ~ Sarah J. Maas

What if, as an act of worship, creating something meant healing and restoration took place instead of pain and frustration? ~ Michelle Dennis Evans

It's a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, "Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me." Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll
then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time. ~ Zadie Smith

We make our worlds of stranger stuff: We choose people who do not annoy us, places of green or glass and steel that feel as alive and necessary as our brothers and sisters, houses in which everything has a place, rules such as Do Not Take Things That Aren't Yours Unless No One Is Looking and Good Things Happen to Good People and A Year Is 365 Days are agreed upon, even when they aren't true, perhaps especially so. ~ Catherynne M Valente

WHEN GOD IS A DRUG - RELIGIOUS ADDICTION Mood alteration is an ingredient of compulsive/addictive behavior. Addiction has been described as "a pathological relationship to any mood-altering experience that has life-damaging consequences." Toxic shame has been suggested as the core and fuel of all addiction. Religious addiction is rooted in toxic shame, which can be readily mood-altered through various religious behaviors. One can get feelings of righteousness through any form of worship. One can fast, pray, meditate, serve others, go through sacramental rituals, speak in tongues, be slain by the Holy Spirit, quote the Bible, read Bible passages, or say the name of Yahweh or Jesus. Any of these can be a mood-altering experience. If one is toxically shamed, such an experience can be immensely rewarding. The disciples of any religious system can say we are good and others, those not like us, the sinners, are bad. This can be exhilarating to the souls of toxically shamed people. ~ John Bradshaw

How does worship, or education, or community interaction form the kind of character that actually does what Jesus calls for - become actively engaged in being a peacemaker? ~ Glen H. Stassen

Grace is the music that happens inside of you when you hear the music. ~ Jason Gray

Rain is the subject of prayer, the kind gesture of saints. Dear City, explain your irreverence: in you, rain is a visitor with nowhere to go. Where is the ground that knows only the love of water? What are the passageways to your heart? Pity the water that stays and rises on the streets, pity the water that floods into houses, so dark and filthy and heavy with rats and dead leaves and plastic. How ashamed water is to be what you have made it. What have you done to its beauty, its graceful body in pictures of oceans, its clear face in a glass? ~ Conchitina Cruz

We are commanded to associate with, pray and worship with fellow believers, plus it's medically indicated. Neuroscientist John Cacioppo concluded that people who don't associate regularly with other people are more prone to illness, obesity and feelings of helplessness. (Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection). ~ John Price

If something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land. ~ Oscar Wilde

Some of the most remarkable and profound worship encounters I've experienced have happened in churches with no production, no lighting, no exciting visuals or amplification, sometimes with not even a single musical instrument. ~ Tim Hughes

The first thing we learn is that worship has to do with real life. It is not a mythical interlude in a week of reality. Worship has to do with adultery and hunger and racial conflict. ~ John Piper

Worship is the launching pad for life. ~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Both the mythical and archaeological evidence indicate that perhaps the most notable quality of the pre-dominator mind was its recognition of our oneness with all of nature,which lies at the heart of both Neolithic and the Cretan worship of the Goddess. Increasingly, the work of modern ecologists indicates that this earlier quality of mind, in our time often associated with some types of Eastern spirituality, was far advanced beyond today's environmentally destructive ideology. ~ Riane Eisler

I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood. ~ Orhan Pamuk

MOST of the ugliness in the human narrative comes from a distorted quest to possess beauty. COVETING begins with appreciating blessings: MURDER begins with a hunger for justice. LUST begins with a recognition of beauty. GLUTTONY begins when our enjoyment of the delectable gifts of GOD starts to consume us. IDOLATRY begins when our seeing a reflection of God in something beautiful leads to our thinking that the beautiful image bearer is worthy of WORSHIP. ~ Shane Claiborne

Monet Refuses the Operation"

Doctor, you say that there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weig ~ Lisel Mueller

There are the altars, but here is the greatest of altars, the living, conscious human body, and to worship at this altar is far higher than the worship of any dead symbols. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties - it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses. ~ Aime Cesaire

How beautiful the house was with
its magnolia trees lining the drive,
their branches outstretched as if they
were beckoning him inside. Rose tipped
blossoms caught the last of the sun's
golden light, giving the flowers
an ethereal glow that shimmered
and looked magical. ~ Ellen Read

Soon only the street lamps rose clear and shone down on a mass that devoured everything, people and houses, we could not see more than three meters in front of us. The lights around us were hard to make out and Jesper stayed where he was; stretching out his arms like a blind man he said:
'This is what it must have been like when the Man from Danzig was shipwrecked. He must have been frightened. He thought he knew where everything was, and then it was all sheer chaos. Put your hand in front of your eyes, Sistermine, and spin around three times, then tell me which is the way home.'
I did as he said, I spun around so I almost fell down, I opened my eyes and peered in all directions.
'I don't know.'
'Then anything can happen. ~ Per Petterson

All of our faith and practice arise out of the drama of Scripture, the "big story" that traces the plot of history from creation to consummation, with Christ as its Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. And out of the throbbing verbs of this unfolding drama God reveals stable nouns - doctrines. From what God does in history we are taught certain things about who he is and what it means to be created in his image, fallen, and redeemed, renewed, and glorified in union with Christ. As the Father creates his church, in his Son and by his Spirit, we come to realize what this covenant community is and what it means to belong to it; what kind of future is promised to us in Christ, and how we are to live here and now in the light of it all. The drama and the doctrine provoke us to praise and worship - doxology - and together these three coordinates give us a new way of living in the world as disciples. ~ Michael S. Horton

Idris had been green and gold and russet in the autumn, when Clary had first been there. It had a stark grandeur in the winter: the mountains rose in the distance, capped white with snow, and the trees along the side of the road that led back to Alicante from the lake were stripped bare, their leafless branches making lace-like patterns against the bright sky.
Sometimes Jace would slow the horse to point out the manor houses of the richer Shadowhunter families, hidden from the road when the trees were full but revealed now. She felt his shoulders tense as they passed one that nearly melded with the forest around it: it had clearly been burned and rebuilt. Some of the stones still bore the black marks of smoke and fire. "The Blackthorn manor," he said. "Which means that around this bend in the road is …" He paused as Wayfarer summited a small hill, and reined him in so they could look down to where the road split in two. One direction led back toward Alicante - Clary could see the demon towers in the distance - while the other curled down toward a large building of mellow golden stone, surrounded by a low wall. " … the Herondale manor," Jace finished.
The wind picked up; icy, it ruffled Jace's hair. Clary had her hood up, but he was bare-headed and bare-handed, having said he hated wearing gloves when horseback riding. He liked to feel the reins in his hands. "Did you want to go and look at it?" she asked.
His breath came out in a white cloud. "I'm not sure. ~ Cassandra Clare

Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books. American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year. This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years. Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books, and you get a bookshelf-warping total of twenty-eight million books available for an English reader in the next fifty years! But you can read only 2,600 - because you are a wildly ambitious book devourer ... For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don't have the time (or money!). ~ Tony Reinke

God has given us the use of his resources for a short time here on earth, and we have much to be grateful for. Go through your day sometime just recognizing that everything is God's. Get out of God's bed and walk into God's bathroom, and turn on God's shower, and then put on God's clothes. Eat God's cereal* and drink God's coffee. Get in God's car and head to work. When we start to see all of our resources as God's it helps us develop an attitude of gratitude that leads to a heart of worship. ~ Kyle Idleman

The question remains: How does God want to be worshipped? Where can we go to find God's reply to that question? You know the only answer: to God's all-sufficient Word, the Bible. That God-breathed book is the comprehensive and completed revelation of the will of God for us by which we can be thoroughly equipped for every good work, including the good work of worship. ~ Joseph C. Morecraft III