One of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s most memorable statements was about his faith, writing in his 1997 book Sources of Strength: Biblical Meditations for a Living Faith: “We should live as if Christ had come this afternoon.” For decades, both during his presidency and long after, Jimmy Carter famously taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. In 1997, he compiled these Bible lessons, personal prayers, and Bible meditations into a daily devotional called Sources of Strength.This quote appears in a reflection on the Christian doctrine of the Second Coming and the idea of spiritual preparation. Carter argued that the return of Christ should not be viewed as a distant, abstract event or get bogged down in trying to predict the exact date, but rather as an immediate, everyday motivation.Carter’s quotes connect profound theology with practical, everyday action. It transforms abstract religious concepts into urgent calls to do good immediately.Carter said the same thing in class when he was relatively unknown. He first used the phrase in March 1976 while speaking to a Bible class at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. At the time, Carter was a relatively unknown former Georgia governor running a dark horse presidential campaign.
Jimmy Carter’s Life, Politics, and Nobel Prize
Carter was born in the small town of Plains, Georgia, in 1924. He grew up on his family’s rural farm and was deeply influenced by the community’s devout Baptist faith. He graduated from the U.S. Entered the Naval Academy in 1946 and entered the groundbreaking nuclear submarine program. However, when his father died in 1953, Carter made the difficult decision to resign from the Military Commission and return to Plains to run the family’s failing peanut-growing business, successfully turning it into a thriving enterprise.Carter entered politics as a Georgia senator in the 1960s and won the Georgia governorship in 1970. He gained national attention as part of a new wave of moderate Southern governors who openly rejected the region’s long history of segregation and worked aggressively to remove racial barriers and eliminate bureaucratic waste.The Watergate scandal made the American public deeply cynical about politicians, and Carter launched a long-shot campaign for the presidency in 1976. An honest, devout political outsider who promised “I will never lie to you,” he defeated incumbent Gerald Ford to become the 39th President of the United States.In 1980, he lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan. Carter viewed his electoral defeat as the beginning of a new kind of service. In 1982, he and his wife, Rosalynn, founded The Carter Center in Atlanta. Over the next 40 years, Carter served as a global peacemaker through the center, overseeing more than 100 free elections around the world and advocating for global health initiatives. Most notably, the Carter Center led a relentless international campaign that successfully brought the horrific dracunculiasis disease to the brink of complete global eradication. In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He died in December 2024 at the age of 100.
