Quotes About a Relationship with God for Sermons and Discipleship
Scripture and two well-documented voices, Augustine and A.W. Tozer, on knowing God rather than merely knowing about him.
Scripture consistently describes faith less as a set of correct beliefs and more as a relationship with real address: seeking, drawing near, remaining, panting after. The quotes below stay inside that vocabulary.
Two authors are included whose whole body of work is organized around this theme and whose specific books are easy to check: Augustine's Confessions and A.W. Tozer's The Knowledge of the Holy.
Quotes about relationship with god
Scripture is quoted from the World English Bible (public domain). Every non-scripture quote names its specific source so you can verify it before you preach it.
“You will seek me, and find me, when you search for me with all your heart.”
Jeremiah — Jeremiah 29:13 (WEB)
“As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants after you, God.”
The sons of Korah — Psalm 42:1 (WEB)
“Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”
James — James 4:8 (WEB)
“I am the vine. You are the branches. He who remains in me, and I in him, bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”
Jesus — John 15:5 (WEB)
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, then I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with me.”
Jesus — Revelation 3:20 (WEB)
“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new; late have I loved you.”
Augustine — Confessions, Book X (c. 397)
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
A.W. Tozer — The Knowledge of the Holy (1961), opening line
Using these quotes in preaching
- 1John 15:5 is worth distinguishing from a merely moral reading: "remain" is relational vocabulary, not a behavior checklist, and the fruit is described as a result of the relationship rather than a separate obligation.
- 2James 4:8 pairs well as a response text after a sermon has spent time on human distance from God. It puts the initiative on the hearer without pretending God is passive or distant first.
- 3The Tozer line is deliberately provocative as an opening for a sermon on this theme: it argues that a wrong picture of God, more than any single sin, is the root problem underneath most spiritual dysfunction.
- 4Augustine's "late have I loved you" is a confession of delay, not just affection, useful for a congregation carrying regret about years spent at a distance from God rather than joy at a present closeness.
Frequently asked questions
What does the Bible mean by "knowing God"?
Biblical language for knowing God (the Hebrew yada and the personal, relational sense of Greek ginōskō) implies intimacy and experience, not just information, closer to how scripture uses "know" for a marriage relationship than to academic knowledge.
What is a good verse about drawing near to God?
James 4:8 ("Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you") is the most direct, and it is often paired with Jeremiah 29:13, which promises the same nearness to those who seek with their whole heart.
Is the Augustine "late have I loved you" quote real?
Yes. It appears in Book X of the Confessions and is one of the most frequently quoted lines from the work, easy to verify in any standard translation of the text.
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