Clergyman's

“Human beings seem to have a perpetual tendency to have somebody else talk to God for them. We are content to have the message second-hand. One of Israel’s fatal mistakes was their insistence on having a human king rather than resting on the theocratic rule of God over them. We can detect a note of sadness in the word of the Lord, ‘they have rejected me from being king over them’ (1 Sam. 8:7). The history of religion is the story of an almost desperate scramble to have a king, a mediator, a priest, a pastor, a go-between. In this way we do not need to go to God ourselves. Such an approach saves us from the need to change, for to be in the presence of God is to change.”
— Richard J. Foster

“Your mind was made to know and love God.”
— John Piper

“Without God man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is… One of the deepest forms of poverty a person can experience is isolation… Poverty is often produced by a rejection of God’s love, by man’s basic and tragic tendency to close in on himself, thinking himself to be self-sufficient or merely an insignificant and ephemeral fact, a “stranger” in a random universe…The human being develops when … his soul comes to know itself and the truths that God has implanted deep within, when he enters into dialogue with himself and his Creator… It is not by isolation that man establishes his worth, but by placing himself in relation with others and with God.”
— Pope Benedict XVI