One of former US President Jimmy Carter’s most memorable statements was on his faith, as he wrote in his 1997 book ‘Sources of Strength: Meditations on Scripture for a Living Faith’ – “We should live our lives as if Jesus Christ were coming this afternoon”. For decades, both during and after his presidency, Jimmy Carter famously taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. In 1997, he compiled those Bible readings, personal prayers, and Bible meditations into a daily devotional book called Sources of Wisdom.This quote appears as a reflection on the Christian doctrine of the Second Coming and the idea of spiritual readiness. Rather than treating the return of Christ as a distant, abstract event or engaging in trying to predict an exact date, Carter argued that it should be treated as an immediate, daily inspiration.Carter’s famous quote combined deep theology with practical, everyday action. It transformed an abstract religious concept into an urgent call to do good now.When Carter was relatively unknown, he said the same thing in his classes. He first used this phrase in March 1976 while addressing his Bible class at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. At the time, Carter was a relatively unknown former Georgia governor who was running a secret campaign for the presidency.
Jimmy Carter’s life, politics, Nobel Prize
Born in 1924 in the small town of Plains, Georgia, Carter grew up on his family’s rural farm, deeply influenced by his community’s fundamentalist Baptist faith. He graduated from America Entered the Naval Academy in 1946 and the unprecedented nuclear submarine program. However, when his father died in 1953, Carter made the difficult decision to resign his military commission and return to the plains to run the family’s failing peanut farming business, successfully turning it into a thriving enterprise.Carter entered politics as a Georgia state senator in the 1960s and won the Georgia governorship in 1970. He gained national attention as part of a new wave of liberal Southern governors who openly rejected the region’s long history of segregation, actively worked to dismantle racial barriers and eliminate bureaucratic government waste.In the wake of the Watergate scandal – which left the American public deeply cynical about politicians – Carter launched a long-shot bid for the presidency in 1976. Running as an honest, deeply religious 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 suffered a heavy defeat from Ronald Reagan. Carter saw his election defeat as the beginning of a new kind of service. In 1982, he and his wife Rosalynn founded The Carter Center in Atlanta. Through the center, Carter spent the next four decades serving as a global peacekeeper, monitoring more than 100 independent elections around the world and supporting global health initiatives. Most notably, the Carter Center led a sustained international campaign that successfully brought the devastating Guinea worm 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.