Faith in Action: Building a Relationship with God

### Quotes for Outreach

1. "We practice faith every single day, whether you realize it or not. I mean, think about our car. We get in our car and it is designed to get us from point A to point B, right? And so we sit in our car, we push the button and we don't even think about it. But then when it starts, we just go and we get to where we need to go, right? Think about a bridge. We don't consciously have faith in a bridge. But we do because we, we trust that the civil engineers design that bridge in such a way that it's going to hold my car and all the other cars on the bridge." [45:20](Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


2. "Take this chair, for example. I have faith that this chair will hold me. Do you think this chair will hold me? Yes. I can have faith that it will hold me. But you cannot know if it will hold me unless I sit down and I can sing about this chair. I can write poems about this chair. I can do anything I want about this chair, but you will not know that I have a belief or trust in it until I actually do something about it and sit in it. And it held me. So then my faith becomes fact." [47:02](Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


3. "What if we take this same construct and we superimpose it on our spiritual lives, doesn't work very, I mean, it's supposed to work, right? But we can get a little bit confused in this because think about, I think most of us in here would probably say, I believe in God. Would you believe in God? If you don't, you don't have to believe to belong. We always say that around here and we're just glad you're here because we're taking a deep dive into how faith works today." [48:39](Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


4. "Listen, all those things are not bad to have faith in. But what James is communicating, what he's saying to us here is he's saying, there is only one place to put your faith, that there's a working relationship in which you will be loved perfectly. In Ephesians 3, 17 through nine, it says this, I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God's love, to know Christ's love that surpasses knowledge so that you may be filled with the fullness of God." [01:15:55](Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


5. "Like I said earlier, God's in the pool saying, come on, I promise, it's the greatest thing. There's so much life in here. There's so much joy in here. There's so much peace. There's abundance. There's gifts and blessings. Just come. Just come and be with me. Because the relationship I have for you, it is rooted out of a deep love for you. We forget that. We forget that he's for us and not against us." [01:16:45](Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


### Quotes for Members

1. "James is not telling us that we need to feel responsible for housing and feeding every single person that we come across, but he is saying this, your faith needs to be more than what you say. Your faith needs to be more than an intellectual knowledge. It needs to have some action to it. Okay. I want to lay some faith groundwork. Okay. For just. Listen here, I need to lay some groundwork of how faith works. And when it comes to faith, when it comes to our belief in Jesus, our salvation, all that's required from us is belief." [53:45](Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


2. "Faith should hinge on relationship, not ritual. Our faith should hinge on a relationship with him, not ritual. Let me ask you this. When you think of your faith, would you say that it resembles a relationship? Or a ritual? Would you say that it resembles, oh, I get to do these things. I have affection. I want to do these things. Things should be just coming and flowing. I get to do these things. I want to do these things. I want to dive into it with the word. I want to be closer to him." [01:05:43](Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


3. "Relationships take time. And so often, we're so quick to throw out our faith because we're frustrated that it hasn't worked like we thought it should. But relationships, he's saying, when you connect your faith with a relationship, it's going to take time. Another thing about relationships is obligation versus affection. I think of how this plays into our relationship with God is that he doesn't want us to come to him and do these things out of obligation. No, he wants us to do these things out of affection for him and what he's done for us." [01:03:17](Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


4. "Listen, I'm trying to say this. Faith should hinge on relationship, not ritual. Our faith should hinge on a relationship with him, not ritual. Let me ask you this. When you think of your faith, would you say that it resembles a relationship? Or a ritual? Would you say that it resembles, oh, I get to do these things. I have affection. I want to do these things. Things should be just coming and flowing. I get to do these things. I want to do these things. I want to dive into it with the word. I want to be closer to him." [01:05:43](Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


5. "Charles Spurgeon said it this way. He has a quote about faith and works. And what he says is that faith is kind of like a tree. The leaves on the tree don't give it life. But when the leaves are absent, it proves that the tree is dead. So it's not the faith or it's not the fruit in the leaves that are actually giving that tree a vibrant life. But when they're gone, we can tell that that tree is dead." [01:19:36](Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)