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Over 500 inspiring quotes from Christians and non-Christians alike.
This collection of quotes is by no means an endorsement of
the secular philosophies or religious beliefs of all that are included. This
also includes Christian authors who may be sound in some areas of doctrine but
deficient in others.
“Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far.”
“The dignity and significance of human life—of these, and of these alone, tragedy will never let go. Without them there is no tragedy. To answer the question, what makes a tragedy, is to answer the question wherein lies the essential significance to life, what the dignity of humanity depends upon in the last analysis.… It is by our power to suffer, above all, that we are of more value than the sparrows.… What do outside trappings matter, Zenith, or Elsinore? Tragedy’s preoccupation is with suffering.”
“The reason there is so much misery in marriage is not that husbands and wives seek their own pleasure, but that they do not seek it in the pleasure of their spouses. The biblical mandate to husbands and wives is to seek your own joy in the joy of your spouse.”
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
“We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapors, these are the daily weather of this world. Whatever else we have grown accustomed to, we have grown accustomed to the unaccountable. Every stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.”
“[tolerance is] the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.”
“Habit, routine, our daily humdrum apathy and indifference, this is the shield we put between us and reality, the shield with which we protect ourselves from life while we are engaged in the business of living. It is the function of the arts to pierce that shield, to re-awaken in us a forgotten knowledge.”
“My strong advice to you is to soak, soak, soak in philosophy and psychology, until you know more of these subjects than ever you need consciously to think. It is ignorance of these subjects on the part of ministers and workers that has brought our evangelical theology to such a sorry plight. . . . The man who reads only the Bible does not, as a rule, know it or human life.”
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
“Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 10 Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
“I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of His body, which is the church,…”
“When I die, I will be identified with Christ’s exaltation. But right now, I’m identified with His affliction.”
“Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to see it as something done by us.”
“It is not until we learn that one grief outweighs a thousand joys, that we will ever understand what Christianity is trying to make us.”
“I am not so much afraid of death as ashamed of it.”
“You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you,”
“Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts, the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”
“A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.”
“Boasting is the voice of pride in the heart of the strong. Self-pity is the voice of pride in the heart of the weak.”
“A vulgar man is captious and jealous, eager and impetuous about trifles. He suspects himself to be slighted, and thinks everything that is said is meant for him.”
“Gratitude awakens the soul to the sweetness of being tethered to God and humanity. A refusal to be “beholden” breaks all ties whereby the soul drifts into isolation with the ever-intensifying sense of entitlement and rancorous pride. Ungrateful people will not be bound by such a debt. They care infinitely more what is owed them.”
“Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant… Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.”
“Incivility is the extreme of pride: it is built on the contempt of mankind.”
“Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed; drink deep, until the habits of the slave, the sins of emptiness, gossip and spite, and slander, die.”
“Subjection to moods is the mark of a deteriorating morality. There is no baser servitude than that of the man whose caprices are his masters, and a nation composed of such men could not long preserve its liberties.”
“. . . a naïve non-judgmentalism often masquerades as moral humility. A refusal to make moral judgments is not humility—it is insanity.”
“It is with Nations as with individuals, those who know the least of others think the highest of themselves: for the whole family of Pride and Ignorance are incestuous, and mutually beget each other.”
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
“Truth is that which corresponds to reality as it is perceived by God.”
“If there is no God all things are permissible.”
“There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters a rotten system allows things to take a new and natural order.”
“If a fool knows a secret, he tells it because he is a fool; if a knave knows one, he tells it whenever it is his interest to tell it, but women and young men are very apt to tell what secrets they know from the vanity of having been trusted.”
“Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—this is not easy.”
“It is oftentimes our vocation to suffer.”
“The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, …of power, of hatred… That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.”
“If there be a poor tried believer, weep with him, and bear his cross for the sake of Him who wept for thee and carried thy sins.”
“The Lord our God is a God of humble and perplexed hearts, who are in need, tribulation, and danger. If we were strong, we should be proud and haughty. God shows his power in our weakness; he will not quench the glimmering flax, neither will he break the bruised reed.”
“…Therefore, our sufferings testify to the kind of love Christ has for the world.”
“the pursuit of joy in God, whatever the pain, is a powerful testimony to God’s supreme and all-satisfying worth.”
“Heavier the cross, the heartier prayer; The bruised herbs the most fragrant are. If sky and wind were always fair, The sailor would not watch the star; And David’s Psalm had ne’er been sung, If grief his heart had never wrung.”
“Preservation is but the continuation of creation, the non-interruption of the first act of divine power and love. The strong spirit of the highest angel needs the active concurrence of God every moment, lest it should fall back into its original nothingness.”
“[suffering is] . . . a friend we need to learn to embrace—who has come to strengthen us through a more intimate walk with Him. And though the pain may be overwhelming at times, God has chosen this process that we might deepen our fellowship with Him, and as a result experience deeper levels of joy in His presence….”
“Trials and temptations appear before deliverance, after deliverance comes joy. To be suppressed and troubled, is to arise, to grow and to increase.”
“Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put.”
“All are bigots who limit the divine within the boundaries of their present knowledge.”
“That Jones should worship the God within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.”
“Truth without emotion produces dead orthodoxy and a church full (or half full) of artificial admirers (like people who write generic anniversary cards for a living). On the other hand, emotion without truth produces empty frenzy and cultivates shallow people who refuse the discipline of rigorous thought.”
“He gives his Spirit to be united to the faculties of the soul…”
“To avoid controversy is to avoid Jesus.”
“Youth, ordinarily, is a post and ready servant for Satan, to run errands; for it is a nest for lust, cursing, drunkenness, blaspheming of God, lying, pride, and vanity. Oh, that there were such an heart in you as to fear the Lord, and to dedicate your soul and body to His service! When the time cometh that your eye-strings shall break, and your face wax pale, and legs and arms tremble, and your breath shall grow cold, and your poor soul look out at your prison house of clay, to be set at liberty; then a good conscience, and your Lord's favour, shall be worth all the world's glory. Seek it as your garland and crown.”
“Most men are not satisfied with the permanent output of their lives. Nothing can wholly satisfy the life of Christ within His followers except the adoption of Christ’s purpose toward the world He came to redeem. Fame, pleasure and riches are but husks and ashes in contrast with the boundless and abiding joy of working with God for the fulfillment of his eternal plans. The men who are putting everything into Christ’s undertaking are getting out of life its sweetest and most priceless rewards.”
‘“So the Lord said to him, “Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes the mute, the deaf, the seeing, or the blind? Have not I, the Lord?”’
“…Jesus indicates that the way we should think about self-denial is to deny yourself only a lesser good for a greater good. …Jesus wants us to think about sacrifice in a way that rules out all self-pity.”
“For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia: that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life. Yes, we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead,”
“We must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God.”
“Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you;”
“Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! blow upon my garden, that its spices may flow out.”
“The discovery of fraudulence, I believe, is one of the principal aims and achievements of true education, if not the first of them all. A man soundly fitted for life is not one who believes what he is told, as a schoolboy believes, but one trained in differentiating between the true and the false, and especially trained in weighing and estimating authority. If the young man at college learns nothing else save the fact that many of the bigwigs of the world are charlatans, and that positions and attainments do not necessarily go together, then he has learned something of the utmost value. The tragedy of the world is that the great majority of human beings never learn it.”
“The order of castes is the dominating law of nature… The first caste comprises those who are obviously superior to the mass intellectually; the second includes those whose existence is chiefly muscular; and the third is made up of the mediocre. The third class, very naturally, is the most numerous, but the first is the most powerful… Whom do I hate most among the men of today? The socialist who undermines the workingman’s healthy instincts, who takes from him his feeling of contentedness with his existence, who makes him envious, who teaches him revenge… There is no wrong in unequal rights: it lies in the vain pretension to equal rights.”
“Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; Who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”
“Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle.”
“Human love is a child of poverty.”
“A bruised reed He will not break, And smoking flax He will not quench . . .”
“Such persons as these, instead of embracing Christ as their Savior from sin, trust in him as the Savior of their sins…”
“Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.”
“The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart, And saves such as have a contrite spirit.”
“Now, when the mind is refreshed and quickened again by the cool air of the Gospel, then we must not be idle, lie down and sleep. That is, when our consciences are settled in peace, quieted and comforted through God’s Spirit, we must prove our faith by such good works as God has commanded. But so long as we live in this vale of misery, we shall be plagued and vexed with flies, with beetles, and vermin, that is, with the devil, the world, and our own flesh; yet we must press through, and not suffer ourselves to recoil.”
“The Scripture saith, ‘They were but one heart and one soul toward God.’ But many, so as not to make a place for the Lord, seek their own things, love their own things, delight in their own power, are greedy for their private interests. Whereas he who would make a place for the Lord, should rejoice not in his private good but in the common good.”
“To the present hour we both hunger and thirst, and we are poorly clothed, and beaten, and homeless. And we labor, working with our own hands. Being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we endure; being defamed, we entreat. We have been made as the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things until now.”
“The measure of your longing for life is the amount of comfort you are willing to give up to get it.”
“We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.”
“How often it is difficult to be wisely charitable; to do good without multiplying the sources of evil. To give alms is nothing unless you give thought also. It is written, not ‘blessed is he that feedeth the poor,’ but ‘blessed is he that considereth the poor.’ A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.”
“Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious… prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft… As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg.”
“Turning, then, to the Lord our God, let us as best we can give thanks with all our hearts, beseeching him that in his goodness he would mercifully hear our prayers, and by his grace drive evil from our thoughts and actions, increase our faith, grant us his holy inspirations, and lead us to neverending joy, through his Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.”
“And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”
“Indirect fulfillment is stripped of virtue whenever it is made a goal of conscious striving.”
“At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.”
“With regard to honor and dishonor the mean is proper pride, the excess is known as a sort of empty vanity, and the deficiency an undue humility.”
“Feminism is a Religion”
“We may talk of “the simple gospel” being enough; and we may thank God that the gospel is simple, and that it is enough. But it is no simple matter rightly to apply this simple gospel in all the varied relations of life, in the multiform emergencies which arise in the tangled business of living.”
“My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him.”
“By knowing yourself, you can know others without imposing your personality upon them; instead you merge with them in a manner that is comfortable, honest, and mutually effective.”
“The rejection of “external authority” and our relegation to “religious experience” for our religious knowledge is nothing more nor less, then, than the definitive abolition of Christianity and the substitution for it of natural religion.”
“Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God Himself. It tells us not to count the cost, it demands of us a total commitment, it attempts to over-ride all other claims and insinuates that any action which is sincerely done ‘for loves sake’ is thereby lawful and even meritorious. That erotic love and love of one’s country may thus attempt to ‘become gods’ is generally recognized. But family affection may do the same. So, in a different way, may friendship.”
“Luther’s wife said to him Sir, I heard your cousin, John Palmer, preach this afternoon in the parish church, whom I understood better than Dr. Pomer, though the Doctor is held to be a very excellent preacher. Luther answered: John Palmer preaches as ye women use to talk; for what comes into your minds, ye speak. A preacher ought to remain by the text, and deliver that which he has before him, to the end people may well understand it. But a preacher that will speak everything that comes in his mind, is like a maid that goes to market, and meeting another maid, makes a stand, and they hold together a goose-market.”
“…nevertheless it is better to do a joyless duty than not to do it, provided there is a spirit of repentance for the deadness of our hearts. …hope that the doing will rekindle the delight.”
“…where God built a church there the devil would also build a chapel.”
“We only progress in sound living as we progress in sound understanding.”
‘“And lest I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I be exalted above measure. Concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.”’
“They think to order all things wisely; but having rejected Christ they will end by drenching the world with bloodshed.”
“A comet is a star that runs, not being fixed like a planet, but a bastard among planets. It is a haughty and proud star, engrossing the whole element, and carrying itself as if it were there alone. ‘Tis of the nature of heretics, who also will be singular and alone, bragging and boasting above others, and thinking they are the only people endued with understanding.”
“No man is at liberty to live backward. If the prophets underwent misjudgment and torment by reason of having to live in the future, what shall be said of those poor rickety creatures who are always trying to go back into the dim past, to exhume the prophets, and to live three or four centuries behind their privileges?”
“For Christians are distinguished from the rest of men neither by country nor by language nor by customs. For nowhere do they dwell in cities of their own; they do not use any strange form of speech.…But while they dwell in both Greek and barbarian cities, each as his lot was cast, and follow the customs of the land in dress and food and other matters of living, they show forth the remarkable and admittedly strange order of their own citizenship. They live in fatherlands of their own, but as aliens. They share all things as citizens and suffer all things as strangers. Every foreign land is their fatherland, and every fatherland a foreign land.…They pass their days on earth, but they have their citizenship in heaven.”
“What can be more immoral than to inflict suffering on me for the sake of deterring others if I do not ‘deserve’ it? And if I do deserve it, you are admitting the claims of ‘retribution’.”
“Fretting about overpopulation, is a perfect guilt-free - indeed, sanctimonious - way for "progressives" to be racists.”
“The church and the Christian should not be interested only, or even primarily, in the general social effects of salvation, but in the fact that men and women should be brought nearer to God, and should live for His glory. When the church gives the world the impression that she is interested in revival only in order to heal certain moral sores, she is denying her own message.”
“Salvation is not a ground for boasting of our worth to God. It is an occasion for self-abasement and joy in the glorious grace of God on our behalf—a grace that never depends on our distinctives, but flows from God’s overwhelming concern to magnify His own glory on behalf of His people.”
“The day that witnesses the conversion of our ministers into political and philosophical speculators or scientific lecturers, will witness the final decay of clerical weight and influence.”
“When you go through a trial, the sovereignty of God is the pillow upon which you lay your head.”
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
“…every duty is a religious duty, and our obligation to perform every duty is therefore absolute.”
“In order to learn the lessons of life, one must everyday surmount a fear.”
“If Christ’s soul had experienced no punishment he would have been only a Redeemer for the body.”
“God will take you where you did not want to go in order to produce in you what you could not achieve on your own.”
“We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.”
“Stop shrinking to fit places you’ve outgrown.”
“The poor of the world cannot be made rich by the redistribution of wealth. Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty, taking their money and giving it as a reward to people who have failed to escape.”
“People today are trying to hang on to the dignity of man, but they do not know how to, because they have lost the truth that man is made in the image of God. . . . We are watching our culture put into effect the fact that when you tell men long enough that they are machines, it soon begins to show in their actions. You see it in their whole culture— in the theater of cruelty, and the violence in the streets, and the death of man in art and life.”
“It will take a culture change on the same scale as the sexual revolution that fractured families and even now relentlessly teaches the gospel of self-indulgence. It will take a renewed love for the ‘least of these’ in our American family, and it will take men and women who care for others not just by sending money but by creating deep and meaningful relationships.”
“The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.”
“It remains to be seen which program will cause greater societal damage: China's one-child policy or America's one-parent policy.”
‘“To the woman He said: “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception;
In pain you shall bring forth children;
Your desire shall be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.”
Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’:
“Cursed is the ground for your sake;
In toil you shall eat of it
All the days of your life.
18 Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you,
And you shall eat the herb of the field.
19 In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
Till you return to the ground,
For out of it you were taken;
For dust you are,
And to dust you shall return.”’
“I often say that we live in an age of trauma. There’s a simple way to think about that. The world is so messed up, we’re having to invent new forms of mental imbalance just to make sense of our own inability to cope with it. The world is so messed up it’s messing with our heads.”
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.”
“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality, but at the same time most intellectually resisted fact.”
“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”
“Never feel self-pity, the most destructive emotion there is. How awful to caught up in the terrible squirrel cage of self.”
“The goal of our life should not be to find joy in marriage, but to bring more love and truth into the world. We marry to assist each other in this task. The most selfish and hateful life of all is that of two beings who unite in order to enjoy life. The highest calling is that of the man who has dedicated his life to serving God and doing good, and who unites with a woman in order to further that purpose.”
“If you don't eat at least one meal with your children, you give up your best opportunity to teach concern for the needs of others. Let’s face it, chaotic meals contribute to self-oriented, pleasure-oriented values. The family meal is an excellent forum to learn about listening to others, taking turns and, in general, contraining instinctual needs in a social context.”
“Gaze not on beauty too much, lest it blast thee; nor too long, lest it blind thee; nor too near, lest it burn thee. If thou like it, it deceives thee; if thou love it, it disturbs thee; if thou hunt after it, it destroys thee. If virtue accompany it, it is the heart's paradise; if vice associate it, it is the soul's purgatory. It is the wise man's bonfire, and the fool's furnace.”
“Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.”
“Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence.”
“The more we love someone, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that true love shows itself.”
“Sex is no longer the consummation of an exclusive bond. Now it is just a form of recreation. A bit like golf, but usually cheaper and generally without the plaid pants.”
“Never tell your problems to anyone…20% don’t care and the other 80% are glad you have them.”
“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock The meat it feeds on.”
“Abandon, or worse yet, seek to disrupt, the nuclear family, and we will continue to see the heartbreak of our boys lacking in self- awareness, seeking identity in temporal and even dangerous things.”
“Biography . . . performs for us some of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mangled tissue of man’s nature and how huge faults and virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character.”
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
“Filming the movie in 3-D only serves to cynically heighten the sense of participatory slaughter.”
“Paul. . . reminds us that according to the wise counsel of God every one has his own portion given to him; for it is necessary to the common benefit of the body that no one should be furnished with fullness of gifts, lest he should heedlessly despise his brethren. Here then we have the main design which the Apostle had in view, that. . .the gifts of God are so distributed that each has a limited portion, and that each ought to be so attentive in imparting his own gifts to the edification of the Church, that no one, by leaving his own function, may trespass on that of another.
By this most beautiful order, and as it were symmetry, is the safety of the Church indeed preserved; that is, when every one imparts to all in common what he has received from the Lord, in such a way as not to impede others. He who inverts this order fights with God, by whose ordinance it is appointed; for the difference of gifts proceeds not from the will of man, but because it has pleased the Lord to distribute his grace in this manner.”
“My father taught in the wise way which unfolds what lies in the child's nature, as a flower blooms, rather than crammed it, like a Strasbourg goose, with more than it could digest.”
“I am Envy...I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.”
“I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to not make a light bulb.”
“A man that hath no virtue in himself, ever envieth virtue in others; for men's minds will either feed upon their own good, or upon others' evil; and who wanteth the one will prey upon the other.”
“The cure for envy lies in living under a constant sense of the divine presence, worshiping God and communing with Him all the day long, however long the day may seem. True religion lifts the soul into a higher region, where the judgment becomes more clear and the desires are more elevated. The more of heaven there is in our lives, the less of earth we shall covet. The fear of God casts out envy of men.”
“Grace is not simply leniency when we have sinned. Grace is the enabling gift of God not to sin. Grace is power, not just pardon.”
“The word “tragedy” presupposes some kind of order or purpose in the world. If the world has purpose and order, then all that occurs in it is meaningful in some respect. The idea of a “senseless tragedy” represents a worldview that is completely incompatible with Christian thought. It assumes that something happens without purpose or without meaning.”
“Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.”
“The governing principles of human nature, the rules which they prescribe, are to be regarded as the commands and laws of the Deity.”
“We have to grasp that getting angry with God and letting loose on the thoughts that are tearing us apart is OK - he is big enough to deal with it. Getting angry means we stay engaged with God and we find release; pretending we're OK can drive a huge wedge into our relationship with him. If we let it, anger can drive us into God's presence looking for answers and there we find there is no need for pretence; we are free to express everything we're feeling before a God who knows and loves us.”
“…[A]lthough Christians with heart disease, diabetes, blood disorders, cancer, etc. do not think that it is unspiritual to seek and use medicines to relieve their symptoms and even cure their illness, many seem to think that there is some special spiritual virtue in suffering depression for months and years without any medical intervention.”
“It is a necessary part of moral character to abhor evil as well as to love good.”
“Sexual assault creates anger at what has been done to victims. While anger can be a natural and healthy response to the unquestionable evil of sexual assault, most victims express it poorly or feel they have to suppress it. They have probably been discouraged from expressing their anger, but suppressed anger holds them hostage and leaves them vindictive, addicted, embittered, and unbelieving.
We want to tell victims that God is angrier over the sin committed against you than you are. He is angry because what happened to you was evil and it harmed you. Godly anger is participating in God’s anger against injustice and sin, crying out to him to do what he promised: destroy evil and demolish everything that harms others and defames God’s name.”
“We instinctively resist and recoil from everything that reminds us of our mortality—pain, deprivation, weakness, criticism, failure. This paralyzing fear . . . leads to various forms of escapism and addiction, induces us to grasp the false security nets proffered by Satan, and keeps us from pursuing the will of God with freedom, peace, and confidence.”
“Gaslighting is about systemically dissolving another person’s sense of self, until they’re questioning their every move and instinct. It’s a pernicious process whereupon reality is distorted, inducing a state of psychological near-paralysis in the disoriented, anxious victim.”
“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
“Always suspect a man who affects great softness of manner, an unruffled evenness of temper, and an enunciation studied, slow, and deliberate. These things are all unnatural, and bespeak a degree of mental discipline into which he that has no purpose of craft, or design to answer cannot submit to drill himself. The most successful knaves are usually of this description, as smooth as razors dipped in oil, and as sharp. They affect the innocence of the dove, which they have not, in order to hide the cunning of the serpent, which they have.”
“So many people are, deep down, afraid of their own minds. Afraid of distressing thoughts, uncomfortable emotions, or painful memories. And so, they construct a life that, at its core, is almost entirely motivated around the principle of staying so busy that they have no time to be alone with their thoughts.”
“For in much wisdom is much grief, And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.”
“Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.”
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains; it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
“To scale great heights, we must come out of the lowermost depths. The way to heaven is through hell.”
“God allows suffering to come into our lives to refine us, as it were, to teach us how to be more and more dependent on Him.”
“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”
“Sickness has frequently been of more use to the saints of God than health has.”
“If you believe that coming to Christ will make life easier and better, then you will be disappointed when suffering comes your way. Storms destroy our homes. Cancer eats up our bodies. Economic recessions steal our jobs. If you see God as a vending machine, then you will become disillusioned when your candy bar doesn’t drop. You may get angry and want to start banging on the machine. Or maybe you will be plagued with guilt, convinced that your suffering indicates God’s disapproval of something you’ve done. When we emphasize the temporal blessings that come from following Christ, we plant the seeds for a harvest of heartbreak.”
“Adversity by its very nature is the removal of things on which our comfort and hope have rested and so it will either result in anger toward God or greater reliance on him alone for our peace. And his purpose for us in adversity is not that we get angry or discouraged, but that our hope shift off earthly things onto God. God’s main purpose in all adversity is to make us stop trusting in ourselves or any man.”
“We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.”
“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.”
“. . . the will of God is exhibited to us in two ways,” and there is a sovereign will, unrevealed to us, that governs all that ever occurs (Deut. 29:29). By this hidden will God may ordain events that by themselves do not please Him but nonetheless contribute to His glory, which is supremely pleasing to Him (Isa. 48:9–11). God finds pleasure not in the suffering, but in the good He works for His glory through the suffering.”
“Joy is not necessarily the absence of suffering, it is the presence of God.”
“Unlike happiness, joy is not dependent upon circumstances.”
“The Bible promises over and over that Christians will suffer many things. Suffering allows us to share in the humiliation and suffering of our Lord; pain makes us more effective witnesses and more mature lovers of God, dependent on him for strength.”
“It is the hope of glory that makes suffering bearable. The essential perspective to develop is that of the eternal purpose of God, which is to make us holy or Christlike.”
“These ‘lacking’ afflictions of Christ’s do not indicate that his suffering was insufficient for our salvation. They are simply a recognition that when you become a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, you become a part of his body. Since you are part of his body, your sufferings are his sufferings. What are the sufferings that are lacking in Christ’s affliction? They are the ones that have not been experienced yet by his body, the church. They will continue to be experienced by his body until he comes again and makes an end of all suffering for his people.”
“...a god who is all love, all grace, all mercy, no sovereignty, no justice, no holiness, no wrath...That god is an idol.”
“The reason physical, horrible evils are in the world is because they are parables of the moral evil we take so lightly. Our sin against a holy God is ten thousand times more outrageous than the sweeping away of all people on the planet in a tsunami.”
‘“The point that has stuck with me over the years was this- suffering isn’t something that happens, nor it is just something God permits. It is instead a vocation, a calling. God does not merely say, “I’m going to make you go through this.” Instead He says, “It is My desire for you that you should go through this. Follow Me.”’
‘“Forgiveness,” Volf writes, ‘places us on a boundary between enmity and friendship, between exclusion and embrace. It tears down the wall of hostility that wrongdoing erects, but it doesn't take us into the territory of friendship.”’
“If naturalism is true, there’s no morality apart from what humans value, want, or prefer. Morality is purely a matter of taste. In short, naturalism implies moral nihilism, the view that there are no human-independent moral rules.”
“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
“And for our relation to the world: the recognition that in the whole world the curse is restrained by grace, that the life of the world is to be honored in its independence, and that we must, in every domain, discover the treasures and develop the potencies hidden by God in nature and in human life.”
“At the psychological level, every story is about rebirth. Stories dramatise the progress of all rites of passage—separation—initiation—return—by showing the transformation of one individual (or, rarely, a pair or group of individuals) through a series of trials. This is the heroic journey, whose elements are common to the mythology of every age and culture. It is a quest, a search for a new life.”
“Life itself is a constant cycle of dying to the old and being reborn in a new identity. Like ancient rituals and the mythology which they dramatised, stories help to lead people safely across the successive thresholds of maturity.”
“ . . . we are all of us God's spoken word, and our responsibility is to grasp the fact of this, and read our lines as though God were the director—because He is. This, in reaction to a dusty kind of orthodoxy that has reduced certain propositions to dead maxims, as dry and crispy as beetles pinned to a museum display board one hundred years ago.”
“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”
“The Calvinist is the man who sees God: God in nature, God in history, God in grace. Everywhere he sees God in His mighty stepping, everywhere he feels the working of His mighty arm, the throbbing of His mighty heart. The Calvinist is the man who sees God behind all phenomena and in all that occurs recognizes the hand of God, working out His will. [The Calvinist] makes the attitude of the soul to God in prayer its permanent attitude in all its life activities; [he] casts himself on the grace of God alone, excluding every trace of dependence on self from the whole work of his salvation.”
“As long as salvation is misunderstood to be partly of God and partly of man, praise will be given only partly to Him.”
“What drove the creation was His intention to share the bliss of the divine life with elect sinners - through the decree of the Father, by the work of the Son, in the love of the Spirit.”
“The love of God does not find but creates that which is pleasing to it.” In explaining this thesis, Luther said, “The first part is clear because the love of God which lives in man loves sinners, loves evil persons, loves fools, and loves weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong.”
“When God carries out this good pleasure in his chosen ones, or works true conversion in them, he not only sees to it that the gospel is proclaimed to them outwardly, and enlightens their minds powerfully by the Holy Spirit so that they may rightly understand and discern the things of the Spirit of God, but, by the effective operation of the same regenerating Spirit, he also penetrates into the inmost being of man, opens the closed heart, softens the hard heart, and circumcises the heart that is uncircumcised. He infuses new qualities into the will, making the dead will alive, the evil one good, the unwilling one willing, and the stubborn one compliant; he activates and strengthens the will so that, like a good tree, it may be enabled to produce the fruits of good deeds.”
“The battle for the Christian life starts with the battle for the Christian mind.”
“It is misleading to say that God accepts us the way we are. Rather he accepts us despite the way we are.”
“One thief was saved that no sinner might despair, but only one, that no sinner might presume.”
“Morality may damn as well as vice. A vessel may be sunk with gold as well as with dung.”
“And so I say that Adam and Eve did die, right away. When the horrible reality of physical death eventually overtook them, it was the culmination of a ghastly process that began the moment sin touched them.”
“Forgetfulness of God’s grace is one of the greatest tools in the enemy’s war against our souls.”
“Every generation must rediscover the Gospel for itself. "Gospel-centered" happens to be the label attached to this generation's recovery of grace. When we tire of the label, get a new one. But keep the reality.”
“Unless there is an element of risk in our exploits for God, there is no need for faith.
“When the will is enchained as the slave of sin, it cannot make a movement towards goodness, far less steadily pursue it.”
“But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”
“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”
“This life was not intended to be the place of our perfection, but the preparation for it.”
“Many who confess Christ are pampering themselves to death rather than pushing themselves to holiness.”
“What is disturbing about this point of view [liberation theology] is that it locates the misery of man in oppressive conditions in society rather than in the concupiscence within the heart of man, and sees a revolution by violence as a way to salvation. The new birth signifies an initiation into the revolutionary struggle for a new world.”
‘“I think a secularist has only one substitute left for God, only one experience in a desacrilized world that still gives him something like the mystical, self-transcending thrill of ecstasy that God designed all souls to have forever, and to long for until they have it. Unless he is a surfer, that experience has to be sex. We’re designed for more than happiness; we’re designed for joy. Aquinas writes, with simple logic, “Man cannot live without joy. That is why one deprived of true spiritual joys must spill over to carnal pleasures.”’
“Where the law condemns, grace forgives through the Lord Jesus Christ. Where the law commands but gives no power, grace commands but does give power through the Holy Spirit who lives and works within us.”
“The issue of faith is not so much whether we believe in God, but whether we believe the God we believe in.”
“In commanding us to glorify him, God is inviting us to enjoy him.”
“I must confess that the doctrine of the final preservation of the saints was a bait that my soul could not resist. I thought it was a sort of life insurance—an insurance of my character, an insurance of my soul, an insurance of my eternal destiny. I knew that I could not keep myself, but if Christ promised to keep me, then I should be safe for ever; and I longed and prayed to find Christ, because I knew that, if I found Him, He would not give me a temporary and trumpery salvation, such as some preach, but eternal life which could never be lost.”
“As God’s mercies are new every morning toward his people, so his anger is new every morning against the wicked.”
“For too long, we've called unbelievers to 'invite Jesus into your life.' Jesus doesn't want to be in your life. Your life's a wreck. Jesus calls you into his life.”
“The closer you get to what makes Christianity ghastly, the closer you get to what makes it glorious.”
“The whole order of material nature has been framed from the beginning for the very purpose of providing for the mutual intercourse of the praying children and of the prayer-hearing Father. . . . All religion presupposes the personality of God, and springs from the personal relations subsisting between man and God. God can and does act upon men from within and below consciousness, turning the hearts of men even as rivers of water are turned. But He also acts upon us through our conscious acts of perception and feeling, called into exercise by His external intercourse with us as a Person speaking to persons. He is always face to face with us, our constant companion and guide and friend. From our creation he is constantly standing to us in the relation of our Father and of our moral Governor. And in these relations we have been sustaining intercourse with Him ceaselessly all our lives. Sin consists in man’s want of sympathy [conformity] with God, his moral character, purposes, and mode of action in these relations. When we are born again by the Holy Ghost, we are brought into sympathy with Him in all these respects, and thus intercourse with Him becomes consciously active on our part, more and more intimate and tender, and a source of joy to us continually.”
“Cultures are constituted by the union of the living and the dead in rituals of living memory. Never before, in our late second world, has the authority of the past been sacrificed with a more conscious effort of forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is now the curricular form of our higher education. This form guarantees that we, of the transition from second to third worlds, will become the first barbarians. Barbarism is not an expression of simple technologies or of mysterious taboos; at least there were taboos and, moreover, in all first worlds, the immense authority of the past. By contrast, the coming barbarism, much of it here and now, not least to be found among our most cultivated classes, is our ruthless forgetting of the authority of the past.”
“Emotion without reason lets people walk all over you; reason without emotion is a mask for cruelty.”
“It is important to remember that labor does not come to us as a result of the Fall. It originates from our God who is a working God. God creates through divine industry, and He calls us to mirror and reflect that operation.”
“Some think of hell as merely a contrast for the scope of our redemption in Christ, as a place God sheepishly created to display this contrast. But this is not what Paul says in Romans 9. God wanted to make his wrath known. The God that we worship, the God of the Bible, rejoices to exercise His justice on sinners.”
“The emanation of divine love to us begins with the Father, is carried on by the Son, and then communicated by the Spirit; the Father designing, the Son purchasing, the Spirit effectually working: which is their order. Our participation is first by the work of the Spirit, to an actual interest in the blood of the Son; whence we have acceptance with the Father.”
“. . . all our progress and perseverance are from God.”
“Is he a God of love or of wrath? God expresses both love and wrath, but where wrath is demonstrated, love is personified. God is love.”
“Our repentance needs to be repented of, and our tears washed in the blood of Christ.”
“It is not simply a step in the application of redemption; when viewed, according to the teaching of Scripture, in its broader aspects it underlies every step of the application of redemption. Union with Christ is really the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation not only in its application but also in it once-for-all accomplishment in the finished work of Christ.”
“When we say that believing is not working, but a ceasing from work, we do not mean that the believing man is not to work, but that he is not to work for pardon, but to take it freely, and that he is to believe before he works, for works done before believing are not pleasing to God.”
“No sinner was ever saved by giving his heart to God. We are not saved by our giving, we are saved by God’s giving.”
“It is the supreme art of the devil that he can make the law out of the gospel. If I can hold on to the distinction between law and gospel, I can say to him any and every time that he should kiss my backside. Even if I sinned I would say, ‘Should I deny the gospeI on this account?’ . . . Once I debate about what I have done and left undone, I am finished. But if I reply on the basis of the gospel, ‘The forgiveness of sins covers it all,’ I have won.”
“The ruin that the fall brought upon the soul of man consists very much in his losing the nobler and more benevolent principles of his nature, and falling wholly under the power and government of self-love. Before, and as God created him, he was exalted, and noble, and generous; but now he is debased, and ignoble, and selfish.”
“The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligations at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.”
“Science without Religion is lame, and Religion without science is blind.”
“Spirituality can be a cheap substitute for righteousness.”
“The Christian religion cannot possibly retain moral and social leadership if its ministers lack an intellectual equipment which is equal to that required by any calling in the most civilized regions of the world. The idea that Christianity can conquer by means of men who do not know what mental discipline is, who hope to maintain their influence by a piety that is divorced from intelligence, or a message that is delivered by intellectual incompetents, is one of the most disastrous which any generation could inherit or cherish.”
“To proclaim the salutary nature of tradition, and in particular the possibility of conversation with the past, is not the same as traditionalism, which is the assertion of one sector of time, the past, against the present.”
“We just are not equipped with the basic ability to defend and contend for our faith... so we separate God from our daily lives with other people.”
“Simple statements of faith are attractive. Often this attractiveness is ascribed to their catholicity, to the fact that they let as many people as possible in. They might also be attractive for a less worthy reason: their simplicity might simply be a function of a culture where nothing that is hard or takes time is considered worthwhile. Mere Christianity, with its minimal doctrinal demands, might also at certain times be a Christianity of instant gratification.”
“And I’ve documented that the Administration, beginning with Secretary of State Clinton, has intentionally used the phrase “freedom of worship” instead of “freedom of religion,” implying that one’s faith is a private matter — and that exercising that faith in public is not a protected right.”
—Chuck Colson
“Let us never forget that the message of the Bible is addressed primarily to the mind, to the understanding.”
“Christian community, by the same token, is not an extra “religious” layer on social life. The Church is not a club for religious people. The Church is a way of living together before God, a new way of being human together.”
“Culture is not a shadowy something existing in secret “behind” its “manifestations” in language, rites, and discipline. Culture is a people organized and united by its language, rites, rules, and mechanisms of enforcement. So also is the covenant. So also is the Church.”
“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”
“If a student has labored merely to equip his mind with a store of facts, and has neglected the high and holy means of sacred meditation, he will look in vain for progress in his labors, for any real or practical value to the church at large-or for his own eternal security. “
“The Church is not a people united by common ideas, ideas which collectively go under the name “Christianity.” When the Bible speaks of a people united by faith it does not simply mean that we have the same beliefs about reality. Though the New Testament does use “faith” to refer to a set of teachings (e.g., 1 Cor. 16:13; 1 Tim. 4:1; 2 Tim. 4:7), “faith” stretches out to include one’s entire “stance” in life, a stance that encompasses beliefs about the world but also unarticulated or inarticulable attitudes, hopes, and habits of thought, action, or feeling.”
“If doctrine doesn’t matter, then truth doesn’t matter...”
“The idea that Christianity is a life and not a doctrine is a false dichotomy—it is a life founded on a doctrine.”
“Now this cannot be done unless we are taught to understand everything which has been ordained for our use. For to say that we can have devotion, either at prayer or at ceremony, without understanding anything about them, is a gross delusion, no matter how much it is commonly said. A good affection toward God is a thing neither lifeless nor bestial, but is a quickening movement proceeding from the Holy Spirit when the heart is truly touched and the understanding enlightened...”
“God doesn’t need our good works, but our neighbor does.”
“The reality of man apart from Christ is guilt and masochism. And guilt and masochism involve the unshakeable inner slavery which governs the total life of the non-Christian. The politics of the anti-Christian will thus inescapably be the politics of guilt. In the politics of guilt, man is perpetually drained of his social energy and cultural activity by his overriding sense of guilt and his masochistic activity. He will progressively demand of the state a redemptive role. What he cannot do personally, i.e., to save himself, he demands that the state do for him, so that the state, as man enlarged, becomes the human savior of man. The politics of guilt, therefore, is not directed, as the Christian politics of liberty, to the creation of godly justice and order, but to the creation of a redeeming order, a saving state. Guilt must be projected, therefore, on all those who oppose this new order and new age.”
“While authentic living brings tribute to the gospel, the former is increasingly becoming the gospel.”
“Making a decision to follow Jesus has never converted anybody.”
“The doctrines of grace humble man without degrading him and exalt him without inflating him.”
“The gate of Mercy is opened, and over the door it is written, ‘This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.‘ Between that word ‘save’ and the next word ‘sinners,’ there is no adjective. It does not say, ‘penitent sinners,’ ‘awakened sinners,’ ‘sensible sinners,’ ‘grieving sinners’ or ‘alarmed sinners.’ No, it only says, ‘sinners.’ And I know this, that when I come, I come to Christ today, for I feel it is as much a necessity of my life to come to the cross of Christ today as it was to come ten years ago—when I come to him, I dare not come as a conscious sinner or an awakened sinner, but I have to come still as a sinner with nothing in my hands.”
“The capacity for perception depends upon the amount, the kind and the availability of past experiences. But past experiences exist for us only in memory. Therefore it is true to say that perception depends upon memory. Closely related to memory is imagination, which is the power of recombining memories in novel ways, so as to make mental constructions different from anything actually experienced in the past.”
“Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.”
“I used to think the worst thing in life is to end up all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.”
“Actively listen to each other. Again, your boyfriend’s hard life may mean he’s not used to having his feelings heard and validated. It seems like you might be facing that same problem in your relationship with him. So, listening to each other and making sure the other person knows they have been heard and understood will help both of you feel safe being emotionally expressive in your relationship. You might also think about setting aside time and space to have these conversations when needed.”
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
“If we put the law at odds with the order established and replicated throughout nature, then how can anyone ever justify drawing a new legal boundary line? If the only requirement for marriage is a feeling of love, how can society or its laws say no to marriages involving more than two people, marriages among siblings, marriages across species, marriages to inanimate objects, etc.? If we adopt the standard that one cannot be prohibited from marrying the object(s) of one's love, then what arrangement becomes so unnatural that we may legally reject it? What the court has been asked to consider is nothing less than choosing to deny a reality that is both rooted in nature and universal to human societies throughout all of human history. It is obligated to weigh whether it is in the best interests of the United States to throw the primary building block of civilization — the family — into chaos. The question before the court is not whether to redefine marriage, but whether to enshrine chaos in law by undefining it. It's hard to imagine a graver error.”
“What unites us as human beings is an urge for happiness which at heart is a yearning for union.”
“When art is made new, we are made new with it. We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer. ‘If that is possible,’ we say to ourselves, ‘then everything is possible’; a new phase in the history of human awareness has been opened up, just as it was opened up when people first read Dante, or first heard Bach’s 48 preludes . . .” “. . . Art [restores] to us the lost wholeness, the sensation of being at one with Nature, and at one with society, which we crave from the moment of birth. . . .”
“Bestiality was legalised in Germany in 1969, the same year that gay sex was also removed from the criminal code. After that, sex with animals was only punishable if the animal was severely injured.”
“If the state can redefine marriage and enforce that redefinition, it can do so with the doctor-patient relationship, the lawyer-client relationship, the parent-child relationship, the confessor-penitent relationship, and virtually every other relationship that is woven into the texture of civil society. In doing so, the state does serious damage to the democratic project. Concurrently, it reduces what it tries to substitute for reality to farce.”
“Outward beauty is not enough, and the woman who would appear fair must not be content with any common manner. Words, wit, play, sweet talk and laughter, surpass the work of too simple nature. Naked loveliness is wasted all in vain, if it not the will to please.”
“Oh I would not have it said of any of you, ‘Well, he may be somewhat Christian, but he is far more a keen money-getting tradesman.’ I would not have it said, ‘Well, he may be a believer in Christ, but he is a good deal more a politician.’ Perhaps he is a Christian, but he is most at home when he is talking about science, farming, engineering, horses, mining, navigation, or pleasure-taking. No, no, you will never know the fullness of the joy which Jesus brings to the soul, unless under the power of the Holy Spirit you take the Lord your Master to be your All in all, and make him the fountain of your intensest delight.”
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
“It is not your business to succeed, but to do right: when you have done so, the rest lies with God.”
“ . . . We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.”
“Above all things never let your son touch a novel or a romance. How delusive, how destructive are those features of consummate bliss! They teach the youthful mind to sigh after beauty and happiness which never existed; to despise the little good which fortune has mixed in our cup by expecting more than she ever gave; and in general, take the word of a man who has seen the world, and has studied human nature more by experience than by precept, take my word for it, I say that such books teach us very little of the world.”
“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
“The effects on such children can be devastating. Children from divorced or never-married homes are more likely to die in infancy, more likely to get divorced themselves or become unwed parents later in life, more likely to live in poverty, more likely to fail in school, less likely to graduate from college and get a good job, less likely to be in good physical health, more likely to abuse drugs as teens and adults, have lower life expectancies, have higher rates of mental illness, be at greater risk of suicide and child abuse—and on and on.”
“Each of us has a unique part to play in the healing of the world.”
“To teach the standards of moral conduct that adorn the gospel and insist that our hearers heed them is neither legalism nor pharisaism but plain apostolic Christianity.”
“Everybody wants to save the world but nobody wants to help mom with the dishes.”
“Must I be carried to the skies
On flowery beds of ease,
While others fought to win the prize
And sailed through bloody seas?”
—IsaacWatts
“Awe your heart, then, with the authority of God in the Scriptures; and when carnal reason says, ‘My enemy deserves to be hated,’ let conscience reply, ‘But doth God deserve to be disobeyed?’ ‘Thus and thus hath he done, and so hath he wronged me.’ ‘But what hath God done that I should wrong him? If my enemy dares boldly to break the peace, shall I be so wicked as to break the precept? If he fears not to wrong me, shall not I fear to wrong God?’ Thus let the fear of God restrain and calm your feelings. Set before your eyes the most eminent patterns of meekness and forgiveness, that you may feel the force of their example. This is the way to cut off the common pleas of flesh and blood for revenge: as thus, ‘No man would bear such an affront:’ yes, others have borne as bad, and worse ones. ‘But I shall be reckoned a coward, a fool, if I pass by this: ‘no matter, so long as you follow the examples of the wisest and holiest of men. Never did any one suffer more or greater abuses from men than Jesus did, nor did any one ever endure insult and reproach and every kind of abuse in a more peaceful and forgiving manner; when he was reviled he reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; when his murderers crucified him he prayed Father, forgive them; and herein he hath set us an example, that we should follow his steps.”
“When your will is God’s will, you will have your will.”
“The opposite of joy is not sadness. It’s hopelessness.”
“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
“It seems odd, that certain men who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves, should think so little of what he has revealed to others.”
“The last thing to be observed is, that the Lord enjoins every one of us, in all the actions of life, to have respect to our own calling. He knows the boiling restlessness of the human mind, the fickleness with which it is borne hither and thither, its eagerness to hold opposites at one time in its grasp, its ambition. Therefore, lest all things should be thrown into confusion by our folly and rashness, he has assigned distinct duties to each in the different modes of life. And that no one may presume to overstep his proper limits, he has distinguished the different modes of life by the name of callings. Every man’s mode of life, therefore, is a kind of station assigned him by the Lord, that he may not be always driven about at random.”
“The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.”
“I only own what I can give away, if I can’t give it away then it owns me.”
“We can be sure our prayers are answered precisely in the way we would want them to be answered if we knew everything God knows.”
“In ancient cultures, myths are inseparable from the rituals which act out their stories. We have always learned about life from dramatizing our questions.”
“A man’s destiny on Judgment Day will depend not on whether he has known God’s will but on whether he has done it.”
“Marriage is a relationship. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you’re sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.”
‘“Does God send trouble?’ Surely, surely. He and he only. To the sinner in punishment, to his children in chastisement. To suggest that it does not always come from his hands is to take away all our comfort. Even the Unitarian poet knew better than that:
These severe afflictions
Not from the ground arise:
But oftentimes celestial benedictions
Assume this dark disguise.”
—BB Warfield
“Divine concurrence. This may be defined as that work of God by which He co-operates with all His creatures and causes them to act precisely as they do. It implies that there are real secondary causes in the world, such as the powers of nature and the will of man, and asserts that these do not work independently of God. God works in every act of His creatures, not only in their good but also in their evil acts. He stimulates them to action, accompanies their action at every moment, and makes this action effective.”
“I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.”
“There is no greater snare in the Christian life than to forget the Person Himself and to live simply on truths concerning Him.”
‘“When Reformed people (and others) speak of preaching, baptism, Communion, covenantal nurture in the home, church discipline, diaconal ministry and so forth, our charismatic brothers and sisters wonder, “Where is the Holy Spirit?” Why? Because they have come to see the Spirit’s work as separate from—even antithetical to—the external ministry of the church and ordinary means of grace.”’
‘“Theology is a “Victorian” enterprise, neoclassically bright and neat and clean, nothing out of place. Whereas the Bible talks about hair, blood, sweat, entrails, menstruation, and genital emissions. Here’s an experiment you can do at any theological library. You even have my permission to try this at home.
Step 1: Check the indexes of any theologian you choose for
any of the words mentioned in section 9 above. (Augustine does not count.
Augustine’s theology is as big as reality, or bigger.)
Step 2: Check the Bible concordance for the same words.
Step 3: Ponder these questions: Do theologians talk about the world the same way the Bible does
“. . . and to expose our hearts to truth and consistently refuse or neglect to obey the impulses it arouses is to stymie the motions of life within us and, if persisted in, to grieve the Holy Spirit into silence.”
“For we give the impression that he who spoke centuries ago is silent today; and that the only word we can hear from him comes out of a book, a faint echo from the distant past, smelling strongly of the mould of libraries. But no, this is not at all what we believe. Scripture is far more than a collection of ancient documents in which the words of God are preserved. It is not a kind of museum in which God's Word is exhibited behind glass like a relic or fossil.”
“The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it.”
“Legalism is a peculiar kind of submission to God’s law, something that no longer feels the personal divine touch in the rule it submits to.”
“Legalism creeps in when we begin to pull apart the law of God from the person of God. . . . When we begin to interpret the law of God without taking account of the person whose law it is. . . . The commandment of God is divorced from the character of God. The commandment of God is divorced from the love and generosity of God.”
“An Antinomian is really just a legalist trying to escape his legalism.”
‘“Prosperity breeds ingratitude. The writers of the Heidelberg Catechism knew this. Question 28 asks what it benefits us to know that God creates and sustains all things. The answer is it gives patience in adversity and gratitude in prosperity. Moses also knew this. In Deuteronomy, he looks ahead to times of material prosperity for Israel, then sternly warns, inspired by the Holy Spirit, not to forget God. “Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ ” (Deut. 8:17). We did this all ourselves. Thanks for nothing. Human nature trends toward ingratitude.”’
“Now Christ so loved the souls of men and had so great a regard to their salvation that he thought it worthy for him to so lay out himself. Shall not his ministers and servants be willing to do the same?”
“Every generation must rediscover the Gospel for itself. "Gospel-centered" happens to be the label attached to this generation's recovery of grace. When we tire of the label, get a new one. But keep the reality.”
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
―Richard Dawkins/River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
“For the believer in Jesus, every trial of suffering is an opportunity to grow in the faith, to grow in our relationship with the Lord, and to see Him work in our lives in a uniquely personal way that demonstrates His compassion, His comfort, His tender mercies, His loving kindnesses, His grace, and His endless love. Only God knows what each of us needs to experience and learn in order to be "conformed to the image of his Son.”
“At the timberline where the storms strike with the most fury, the sturdiest trees are found.”
“One day after a long journey, I rested in front of a house. Suddenly a sparrow came towards me blown helplessly by a strong wind. From another direction, an eagle dived to catch the panicky sparrow. Threatened from different directions, the sparrow flew into my lap. By choice, it would not normally do that. However, the little bird was seeking for a refuge from a great danger. Likewise, the violent winds of suffering and trouble blow us into the Lord's protective hands.”
“God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering.”
“They gave our Master a crown of thorns. Why do we hope for a crown of roses?”
“Regeneration means becoming the seed of another — ultimately, starting with one family tree and then acquiring a different one. My father used to be Adam and now he is the second Adam. My father used to be the devil and now he is Abraham . . . Rebirth entails having been in existence already, with another father.”
“I see that you couldn’t help it or didn’t mean it, you weren’t really to blame. . . . Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it.”
“ . . . Despite their focus on the necessity of change, however, they almost never present an authentic picture of what profound, long-term change actually requires. Instead, they provide good feelings about the concept: reading about change becomes a substitute for change itself. We feel better about our bodies when we read about the possibility of better bodies, more positive about life when we read about positive people, and more hopeful about business when we read about better business practices. Reading this way—even self-help reading—ironically can become a proxy for effective doing.”
“When we're immature we see discipline as a negative thing, but as we grow we begin to see it as one of the most enduring blessings of life. Discipline assures us that we’re loved and cared for. It shows us to whom we belong. It demonstrates we are worth another's time and energy. It makes us confront, confess, and repent of our sins. It humbles us, brings us to our knees to weep over our sin, and draws us close into the embracing arms of our loving protector. Discipline is a blessing.”
“The man who has not consecrated the lapstone—who has not dedicated the counter to God—who has not made the desk and the pen holiness unto the Lord, has yet to learn what the Christian religion is. It is not a uniform to be worn one day and cast away the next; it ought to be a part of the woof and warp of your being; it ought to run in your blood, penetrate the marrow of your bones, work in the arms, gaze from the eyes, and speak from the tongue.”
“We are chosen as an afflicted people and not as a prosperous people, chosen not in the palace but in the furnace.”
“None can know their election but by their conformity to Christ; for all who are chosen are chosen to sanctification.”
“A sincere heart loves to do much for Christ, and not to be seen by any but Christ.”
“This life was not intended to be the place of our perfection, but the preparation for it.”
“Those who will not be persuaded now to fly to the arms of divine grace, which are stretched out to receive them, will not be able to flee from the arms of divine wrath, which will shortly be stretched out to destroy them.”
“We are learning that the gospel is not just the good news that saves us, but the good news that sustains us. It is good news for all of life—good news that informs every area of life. And so we preach the gospel to unbelievers and to believers and to ourselves.”
“To progress is always to begin again.” Real spiritual progress, in other words, requires a daily going backwards.”
“Comfort from the words and promises of Christ sometimes break in through all opposition into the saddest and darkest condition imaginable; it comes and makes men sing in a dungeon, rejoice in flames, glory in tribulation; it will into prisons, racks, through temptations, and the greatest distresses imaginable. Whence is this? the Spirit works effectually, his power is in it; he will work, and none shall let him. If he will bring to our remembrance the promises of Christ for our consolation, neither Satan nor man, sin nor world, nor death, shall interrupt our comfort. This the saints, who have communion with the Holy Ghost, know to their advantage.”
“Too many sermons are written ‘in the imperative mode’, whereas the religion of the Bible ‘is written largely in the revealing language of the indicative mode’ . . . The power of the religion of the Bible is to be found in its affirmations”
‘“Paul calls the gospel “the power of God unto salvation,” and I don’t think he meant the power of God just unto conversion. The gospel remains the power of God unto salvation until we are glorified. Calvin once said we need the gospel preached to us every week, and the Lord’s Supper to ratify that promise, because we are partly unbeliever’s until we die.”’
“The church is not an incidental part of God’s plan. Jesus didn’t invite people to join an anti-religion, anti-doctrine, anti-institutional bandwagon of love, harmony, and re-integration.”
“Sure I am, if it were well understood how much of the pastoral authority and work consisteth in church guidance, it would be also discerned, that to be against discipline, is near to being against the ministry; and to be against the ministry is near to being absolutely against the Church; and to be against the Church, is near to being absolutely against Christ. Blame not the harshness of the inference, till you can avoid it, and free yourselves from the charge of it before the Lord.”
“The Protestant Reformers were united in their affirmation that the Bible teaches justification by faith alone but not by a faith that is alone. Saving faith immediately, necessarily, and inevitably shows evidence of itself in the good works we produce in the process of sanctification. Paul tells us to work out salvation in fear and trembling, as God works in us to will and do (Phil. 2:12–13). We are not to be at ease in Zion or quietists that let go and let God. The whole Christian life requires labor with the godly fear that we call reverence and with the adoration that is ever present in the hearts of those who tremble before the living God. Sanctification is not to be undertaken in a casual matter.”
“Yet American Christianity is mired in this individualistic mindset right along with the rest of the culture. Most American Christians confuse Christianity being a personal faith with its being an individualistic faith.
While each one of us must respond personally to God’s grace, the result of that response is incorporation into Christ’s body, the Church. There, as Chuck Colson constantly reminded us, we are called to live for others and not for ourselves.”
“The image of God is much too rich for it to be fully realized in a single human being, however richly gifted that human being may be. It can only be somewhat unfolded in its depth and riches in a humanity counting billions of members. Just as the traces of God (vestigia Dei) are spread over many, many works, in both space and time, so also the image of God can only be displayed in all its dimensions and characteristic features in a humanity whose members exist both successively one after the other and contemporaneously side by side. . . . Only humanity in its entirety—as one complete organism, summed up under a single head, spread out over the whole earth, as prophet proclaiming the truth of God, as priest dedicating itself to God, as ruler controlling the earth and the whole of creation—only it is the fully finished image, the most telling and striking likeness of God.”
‘“Today, the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely. The great American poem is Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The great American essay is Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” The great American novel is Melville’s Moby-Dick, the tale of a man on a quest so lonely that it is incomprehensible to those around him. American culture, high and low, is about self-expression and personal authenticity. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called individualism “the great watchword of American life.”’
“Many people think their church’s problems are an obstacle standing in the way of their spiritual development. Usually, the opposite is true. It’s their commitment to their church, in spite of its problems, that is making them more like Jesus.”
—Trevin Wax
“The gospel is a story of sorts, of course, but I fear that appeals to the predilections of postmodernity, rather than Scripture itself, are leading some to refashion the gospel as a ‘narrative’ into which we may insert our lives. The gospel of Christ crucified and raised is not just a compelling narrative, not just a story of meaning for one's life and world. It is the centerpiece of human existence and the consummate revelation of the God who defines all meaning whatsoever.”
“The order we observe in the natural realm is even more apparent in the social systems God has established: family, church, community, state, labor, and the union between God and man. Life is a series of relationships that flow out of and reflect the Trinitarian nature of the Creator.”
“You follow the pattern set forth in the New Testament. Although the word “membership” itself is not used the principle is present in the New Testament. For example, most of our NT books are letters that were written to specific groups of people who had chosen to identify themselves with Christ and each other. The word “church” is almost always used to refer to a specific group of people who in some way had committed themselves to serving the Lord and one another in the same ministry location. Numbers were known (Acts 1:15, 2:41, 4:4), rolls were kept (1 Tim. 5:9), servants were selected (Acts 6:2-5), discipline was practiced (1 Cor. 5:12-13), worship was corporate (1 Cor 14:23), and shepherds knew for whom they were responsible (Heb. 13:17). If you are a part of the body of Christ by virtue of repentant faith in Jesus Christ then you should want to make that association visibly known through church membership.”
“He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.”
“If there is one thing that lends itself to promoting practical, or "functional," atheism in our churches today, it is running a church like a business—with its (the administration's) maintaining control the ultimate objective. This fails to treat people as real individuals, instead of members whose everyday needs are secondary to the status-quo of the organization. This has the unintended consequence of relegating the living God to an afterthought, thus breeding a dead faith that shares no identity, no union with the person of Christ.”
“In many of these house church situations, we do not have an embryonic church growing into an established church but an embryonic situation growing into a clan, not a church.”
“Fasting is calculated to bring a note of urgency and importance into our praying, and to give force to our pleading in the court of heaven. The man who prays with fasting is giving heaven notice that he is truly in earnest.”
“Fasting does not change God’s hearing so much as it changes our praying.”
“When we pray together, our needs become public. When he answers, his glory becomes public.”
“In eternity, all sickness will be removed, so ultimately, healing is included in the benefits of the atonement.”
“He that cannot be safely imitated ought not to be tolerated in the pulpit” (Spurgeon, The Greatest Fight in the World, p. 40) “We often talk of unbelief as if it were an affliction to be pitied instead of a crime to be condemned.”
“All doctrines must be brought to the Word of God as the standard, and that, in judging of false prophets, the rule of faith holds the chief place.”
“You can tell who is being worshiped on Sunday morning in a given church by whom the service is attempting to please.”
“Since the people who come to worship are identity-amnesiacs and God-amnesiacs, . . . I want to remind them of who they are—both the scary depth of their need and who they are in Christ—as well as of the grandeur and glory of the God they've been connected to through Christ.”
“If we truly want to have gospel-centered worship, one thing that must be crystal clear is there's only one mediator—one person who’s leading us into the presence of God—and it’s not the guy with the guitar. It's Jesus.”
“Sin goes in a disguise and thence is welcome; like Judas it kisses and kills; like Joab it salutes and slays.”
“What you win people with is what you win them to.”
“Just as sexual pornography twists an understanding for men about real women’s bodies and sexual appetites, so romantic pornography twists the perception for women about real men and how they ‘ought’ to behave toward women, which tends to amount to, well, behaving like a woman.”
“Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern them.”
“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”
“But mainstream evangelicals have been indoctrinated along with the rest of postmodern society to think walls and borders are inherently sinister. We're conditioned to favor a whole different set of more stylish and more politically-correct values: tolerance, openness, diversity, mystery, indecision, broad-mindedness, and liberality. It's considered humble and generous to entertain perpetual qualms about what we believe. We're not supposed to think any single perspective can righteously claim to be true to the exclusion of all others.”
“Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth: this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason... The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping: not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.”
“How can the best life be located in seeking truth and yet never finding it? Is it not the truth of the end point which gives the pursuit its value? And yet the restlessness of this secular mentality would seem to be no different to the aesthetic of our post-evangelical arrivistes who seem to believe it is better to be always travelling than ever to arrive.”
“It must be remembered that it is not claimed that the Scriptures, any more than their authors, are omniscient. The information they convey is in the forms of human thought, and limited on all sides. They were not designed to teach philosophy, science or human history as such. They were not designed to furnish an infallible system of speculative theology. They are written in human languages, whose words, inflections, constructions and idioms bear everywhere indelible traces of human error. The record itself furnishes evidence that the writers were in large measure dependent for their knowledge upon sources and methods in themselves fallible, and that their personal knowledge and judgments were in many matters hesitating and defective, or even wrong. Nevertheless, the historical faith of the Church has always been that all the affirmations of Scripture of all kinds, whether of spiritual doctrine or duty, or of physical or historical fact, or of psychological or physical principle, are without error when the ipsissima verba of the original autographs are ascertained and interpreted in their natural and intended sense.”
“It is fashionable in some academic circles to exercise scholarly criticism of the Bible. In so doing, scholars place themselves above the Bible and seek to correct it. If indeed the Bible is the Word of God, nothing could be more arrogant. It is God who corrects us; we don’t correct Him. We do not stand over God but under Him.”
“To search for [Scripture's] contemporary message without first wrestling with its original meaning is to attempt a forbidden short cut. It dishonours God (disregarding his chosen way of revealing himself in particular historical and cultural contexts), it misuses his Word (treating it like an almanac or book of magic spells) and it misleads his people (confusing them about how to interpret Scripture.”
“The secret mysteries of the faith ought not to be explained to all men in all places… For such is the depth of divine Scripture that, not only the simple and illiterate, but even the prudent and learned are not fully sufficient to try to understand it.”
“The sixteenth century Reformers are rightly given the credit for having recovered this [grammatico-historical] method by rescuing biblical interpretation from the fanciful allegorizations of medieval writers. When they spoke of the 'literal' meaning, they were contrasting it with the 'allegorical'; they were not denying that some passages of Scripture are deliberately poetical in style and figurative in meaning.”
“Let’s be sure we read the word of God with discernment, and make the distinctions implied whenever things look contradictory.”
“When people start focusing on demons, naming them, placing them in hierarchies, aggressively attacking them, listening to them, and forming fanciful mythologies about what they "hear" and "see" them doing, they begin to "speak out" an unreality that is far from Christian.”
“Even an apostle must read.... Paul is inspired, and yet he wants books! He has been preaching for at least 30 years, and yet he wants books! He had seen the Lord, and yet he wants books! He had had a wider experience than most men, and yet he wants books! He had been caught up into the third heaven, and had heard things which it was unlawful for a man to utter, yet he wants books! The apostle says to Timothy and so he says to every preacher, "Give thyself unto reading.”
“I teach in light of the antithesis, the battle between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent that began in Eden and ends with the end of history. I want our students to understand the culture they are living in, the ideological water they are swimming in, so that they might both guard their hearts and press the crown rights of King Jesus.”
“Irony demands a certain attention span, and the ability to sustain antithetical ideas, even when they collide with one another. Strip irony away from reading, and it loses at once all discipline and all surprise. Find now what comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and considering, and it very likely will be irony, even if many of your teachers will not know what it is, or where it is to be found. Irony will clear your mind of the cant of the ideologues, and help you to blaze forth as the scholar of one candle.”
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
“The pastor ought to have two voices: one, for gathering the sheep; and another, for driving away wolves.”
“Ours is an ethically confused world. Materialist scientists tell us that since all is matter, there is no ultimate basis for judgments of "good" and "evil." Relativists claim that what is "good" for one person or culture may not be "good" for another person or culture. Some Christians have largely absorbed the secularist worldview to the point that their lives are virtually indistinguishable from the lives of nonbelievers.
“To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”
“A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God’s truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.”
“Oh, my brethren! bold-hearted men are always called mean-spirited by cowards.”
“It is easier to save us from our sins than from our righteousness.”
“. . . it is not the mark of a Christian mind to take no delight in assertions; on the contrary, a man must delight in assertions or he will be no Christian.”
“For there is some danger of falling into a soft and effeminate Christianity, under the plea of a lofty and ethereal theology. Christianity was born for endurance… It walks with firm step and erect frame; it is kindly, but firm; it is gentle, but honest; it is calm, but not facile; obliging, but not imbecile; decided, but not churlish. It does not fear to speak the stern word of condemnation against error, nor to raise its voice against surrounding evils, under the pretext that it is not of this world.
It does not shrink from giving honest reproof lest it come
under the charge of displaying an unchristian spirit. It calls sin ‘sin,’ on
whomsoever it is found, and would rather risk the accusation of being actuated
by a bad spirit than not discharge an explicit duty. Let us not misjudge strong
words used in honest controversy. Out of the heat a viper may come forth; but
we shake it off and feel no harm.
The religion of both Old and New Testaments is marked by
fervent outspoken testimonies against evil. To speak smooth things in such a
case may be sentimentalism, but it is not Christianity. It is a betrayal of the
cause of truth and righteousness. If anyone should be frank, manly, honest,
cheerful (I do not say blunt or rude, for a Christian must be courteous and
polite), it is he who has tasted that the Lord is gracious, and is looking for
and hasting unto the coming of the day of God.
“But what are we to think? Are we to avoid controversy at all costs? After all, many pastors owe their jobs to avoiding controversy at all costs. But are religious matters ever worth fighting for?”
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.”
“In our day it’s worse to judge evil than to do evil.”
“The invention of religion as a private leisure activity allows people to fit into the state and market without conflict, … Private religion is meant as a refuge, a solace for tired shoppers and harried office workers. Religion helps us escape from or cope with, but not change, the frenetic pace of life in consumer society.”
“Liberalism is the most bigoted philosophy around today.”
‘“I think that our preference for “I feel” may just unmask our culture’s fear of strong convictions and confident self-expression. “I feel” may be a way of safeguarding ourselves in an age that elevates faux tolerance and political correctness as the highest of all virtues. It proactively softens the blow for those things we would otherwise declare to be true and right and good. You may be offended by my thoughts or beliefs, but surely not by my feelings!”’
“Resolve by the grace of God that you will have regular seasons for examining yourself and looking over the accounts of your soul.”
“The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to him, is not to believe that he loves you.”
“Only a fraction of the present body of professing Christians are solidly appropriating the justifying work of Christ in their lives. . . . In their day-to-day existence they rely on their sanctification for justification. . . . Few know enough to start each day with a thoroughgoing stand upon Luther’s platform: you are accepted, looking outward in faith and claiming the wholly alien righteousness of Christ as the only ground for acceptance, relaxing in that quality of trust which will produce increasing sanctification as faith is active in love and gratitude.”
“The cause neither of truth nor of love is promoted by suppressing warranted criticism. Constructively criticizing a faulty view of sanctification can actually advance the cause of truth and love.”
“Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines.
. . . do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.”
“Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.”
“Spiritual abuse is a spiritual role-reversal where a shepherd, instead of clinging to and emulating the Great Shepherd by shepherding God’s people (Acts 20; 1 Peter 5; 1 Timothy 3; Ephesians 4), subtly demands that members exist to meet the shepherd’s needs (James 4:1-4). Rather than relating as a servant leader, the pastor “pulls rank” and “lords it over others” (Matthew 20:20-28; 1 Peter 5:1-6), not for the benefit of the flock, but for the benefit of the pastor. Rather than speaking the truth in love and rather than ministering grace and truth (Ephesians 4:11-16, 29; Colossians 4:3-6; Titus 2:10-12), the spiritually abusive pastor intimidates, judges, condemns, shames, and blames the sheep without regard for the spiritual wellbeing of the sheep (Jeremiah 23:1-4; Matthew 23:1-39).”
“Many think it is impossible for them to gain a right and clear understanding of the Scriptures, and consider them to be full of great difficulties and impenetrable mysteries, beyond the wit of man to unravel. This is simply the result of one thing—a lack of faith.”
“These days, we often hear the much lauded liberal notion that “heresy is better than schism.”
“Reason is a light that God has kindled in the soul.”
“God prospers me not to raise my standard of living, but to raise my standard of giving.”
“We are chosen as an afflicted people and not as a prosperous people, chosen not in the palace but in the furnace.”
“True faith, by Christ’s definition, always involves surrender to the will of God. . . . Faith believes that God can move mountains, but it also knows to anticipate only those things He has promised. . . . That faith can move mountains is not a literal expression, it is a metaphor that means faith can accomplish the impossible (see 1 Cor. 13:2). Of course, power does not inhere in faith itself; faith is not a magical way to manipulate reality. Instead, faith is effective because it is the means by which we access the help of God Himself, with whom all things are possible (Matt. 19:26).”
“It is sometimes hard for us to grasp how profound the problem of modern superficiality is. Religious life in America is, by and large, superficial from the very top of the wet spot on the pavement to the very bottom of the wet spot on the pavement. We are, of course, talking about Joel Osteen.”
“The gospel of Jesus Christ, on the other hand, glorifies neither poverty nor prosperity, but instead offers deliverance, forgiveness, grace, and restoration.”
“Take away assertions and you take away Christianity.”
“Be wise and strong and free from the slavery of culture-conformity. To put it another way, I am calling teenagers to a radical, wartime lifestyle.”
“For the people is our master and the great mob; a savage master and a severe tyrant: not so much as a command being needed in order to make us listen to him; it is enough that we just know what he wills, and without a command we submit: so great good will do we bear towards him. Again, God threatening and admonishing day by day is not heard; but the common people, full of disorder, made up of all manner of dregs, has no occasion for one word of command; enough for it only to signify with what it is well pleased, and in all things we obey immediately. ‘But how,' says some one, ‘is a man to flee from these masters?’ By getting a mind greater than theirs; by looking into the nature of things; by condemning the voice of the multitude; before all, by training himself in things really disgraceful to fear not men, but the unsleeping Eye; and again, in all good things, to seek the crowns which come from Him.”
“Its decision was due to the hard facts of economics: There’s no market for a product that doesn’t work! As you probably know, for years we’ve been told that the use of embryonic stem cells, which destroy human embryos—that is, people—will lead to miracle cures for all kinds of diseases and conditions. The problem for embryonic stem cell advocates is that they failed to produce a single cure.”
“Romance novels are feminist documents written almost exclusively by women, for women, and are concerned with women: their relations in family, love and marriage, their place in society and the world, and their dreams for the future.”
“The womb was scraped clean, but the fetus instead of disappearing simply changed its place of residence. Once it was prevented from growing in her womb, it started growing in her mind, a troubled conscience that could not be repressed . . . The monsters that haunt . . . are the souls of the rejected children.”
“Protection of the life of the mother as an excuse for an abortion is a smoke screen. In my thirty-six years in pediatric surgery I have never known of one instance where the child had to be aborted to save the mother’s life. When a woman is pregnant, her obstetrician takes on the care of two patients—the mother-to-be and the unborn baby. If, toward the end of the pregnancy complications arise that threaten the mother’s health, he will take the child by inducing labor or performing a Caesarian section. His intention is still to save the life of both the mother and the baby. The baby will be premature … The baby is never willfully destroyed because the mother’s life is in danger.”
“Many of our laws in this country are built upon the fantasy that birth, not existence, bestows a fetus with personhood. If you kill a newborn in the United States, as infamous Philadelphia abortionist Kermitt Gosnell did for decades, you go to jail. But just minutes prior, that same act of killing can be legal.”
“It is unfair to draw too tight a comparison between abortion in America and the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. There are significant differences. First, the Holocaust was carried out, by and large, in secret. The rank and file Germans had no idea what was going on. We, on the other hand, every last one of us, woke up today knowing that four thousand babies would die today. We, on the other hand, have four thousand mothers, every day, who knowingly do this. We, on the other hand, have four thousand fathers, boyfriends and husbands who every day encourage this. The Holocaust lasted roughly ten years, and the Nazi’s killed roughly six million people. We, on the other hand, have been at this for 35 years, and have killed more than fifty million babies. It is an unfair comparison, unfair to the Nazis. We are far worse monsters.”
“This triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.”
“One form of capital punishment everybody seems to approve: killing an attacker in self-defense. That is, most people will defend saving one’s own life, even if it requires taking the life of the would-be killer. There is a great division of opinion among us at the present time whether killers, after they have killed, should be killed. But there is virtually no difference of opinion that killers, before they are successful in killing, should be killed, if that is the only way that they can be stopped.”
“Love without power is an invitation to surrender the world to power without love.”
“I am to love my neighbor as myself, in the manner needed, in a practical way, in the midst of the fallen world, at my particular point of history. This is why I am not a pacifist. Pacifism in this poor world in which we live—this lost world—means that we desert the people who need our greatest help.”
“Churchmen in peace and quiet pray to Heaven for the welfare of the world, but we soldiers and knights carry into effect what they pray for... Thus are we God's ministers on earth and the arms by which his justice is done therein.”
“The church is not a counter-polis, but a people with a counter-hope. This makes the church radically open; the Christian’s sense of identity and difference from the world does not depend on erecting impenetrable boundaries between church and world.”
“The tragic sense is the profoundest sense of our humanity.”
‘“Listen, it’s our duty as citizens of the Kingdom of God to be the best citizens of the society we live in. If your pastor no longer has energy or courage to motivate his flock to speak out on public issues, maybe you can lovingly “buck him up.” Remind him or her that God’s people are to love their neighbors, to desire the best for them, to pursue the common good. And we can’t do that on the political sidelines.”’
—Chuck Colson
“There is not now, nor was there ever, a kingdom on earth and a kingdom in heaven, because there is only one King. We do not wait for His kingdom. We do not wait for His inauguration. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Him (Matt. 28:18–20). Now He sits at the right hand of the Father (Rom. 8:34). Now He is bringing all things under subjection. Now He is conquering all His and our enemies (1 Cor. 15:20–28). This is not merely a future hope, but a present reality.”
“Christians are not required of God to force the kingdom of God upon the world. And in light of God’s sovereignty we should not get scared to the point of all-out political activism: “And therein lies another lesson we learned from you. We can be prophetic, denouncing all that is wrong in the world and in the church, and still sleep the sleep of children, at peace and at rest, knowing that all that is wrong works out for the best. Even when we fail we do exactly what we are supposed to do, bring glory to God, if only because He has redeemed sinners like us, that He gives us shelter under His wing.”
“…when we gather for corporate worship we don't come as Americans, we come as Christians.”
“Nations are renewed from the bottom, not from the top.”
“That in spite of all worldly opposition, God's holy ordinances shall be established again in the home, in the school and in the State for the good of the people; to carve as it were into the conscience of the nation the ordinances of the Lord, to which Bible and Creation bear witness, until the nation pays homage again to him.”
“There is no time in human history when you were more perfectly represented than in the Garden of Eden because your representative was chosen infallibly by a perfectly holy, perfectly just, omniscient God. So I cannot say that I would have done differently than Adam did.”
‘“In friendship . . . we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another . . . the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting—any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends, “Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.”’
“. . . since to him belongs the disposal of life and death, he arranges all things by his sovereign counsel, in such a way that individuals are born, who are doomed from the womb to certain death, and are to glorify him by their destruction.”
“Let us not then seek relaxation: for Christ promised tribulation to His disciples and Paul says, ‘All who will live godly in Christ Jesus, shall suffer persecution.’ [2 Timothy 3:12] No noble-spirited wrestler, when in the lists, seeks for baths, and a table full of food and wine. This is not for a wrestler, but for a sluggard. For the wrestler contendeth with dust, with oil, with the heat of the sun's ray, with much sweat, with pressure and constraint. This is the time for contest and for fighting, therefore also for being wounded, and for being bloody and in pain. Hear what the blessed Paul says, ‘So fight I, not as one that beateth the air.’ [1 Corinthians 9:26] Let us consider that our whole life is in combats, and then we shall never seek rest, we shall never feel it strange when we are afflicted: no more than a boxer feels it strange, when he combats. There is another season for repose. By tribulation we must be made perfect.”
“Learn . . . learn the motions of the mind, why you are made, for what you are design'd, and the great moral end of human kind. Study thyself, what rank, or what degree the wise Creator has ordain'd for thee: and all the offices of that estate perform, and with thy prudence guide thy fate.”
“The Reformed agree that God knows what would happen under all conditions, but they reject the notion that this knowledge is ever ultimately based on man's autonomous decisions. Human decisions, they argue, are themselves the effects of God's eternal decrees (see Acts 2:23, Rom. 9:10-18, Eph. 1:11, Phil. 2:12-13).”
“Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom.”
“I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about the toothache and about lying awake.’ That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflections: the fact that you don't merely suffer, but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”
“Christ refuses none for weakness, but accepts none for greatness.”
“Question: When do we forgive others? Answer: When we strive against all thoughts of revenge; when we will not do our enemies mischief, but wish well to them, grieve at their calamities, pray for them, seek reconciliation with them, and show ourselves ready on all occasions to relieve them.”
“We are not bound to trust an enemy; but we are bound to forgive him.”
“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
“What is a typical day of ministry like at the abortion clinic? John Barros: We pray for those on their way...”
“When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”
“When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.”
“Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.”
“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
“Maybe some people just aren't meant to be in our lives forever. Maybe some people are just passing through. It's like some people just come through our lives to bring us something: a gift, a blessing, a lesson we need to learn. And that's why they're here. You'll have that gift forever.”
“We can always convict such people of sentimentalism by their weakness for euphemism. The phrase they use is always softened and suited for journalistic appeals. They talk of free love when they mean something quite different, better defined as free lust. But being sentimentalists they feel bound to simper and coo over the word “love.” They insist on talking about Birth Control when they mean less birth and no control. We could smash them to atoms, if we could be as indecent in our language as they are immoral in their conclusions.”
“There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.”
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
“Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.”
“The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”
“Until men are convinced of sin, they will not be instructed in righteousness”
“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it.”
“Tell me what the world is saying today, and I’ll tell you what the church will be saying in seven years.”
“Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up ’cause they’re looking for ideas.”
“The make-believe, the play, the humor, the delight is the mythological perspective on life. In the Hindu tradition, the world is said to be “God’s play,” “God’s dance.” When one plays life that way, one awakes creative vital energies in oneself that otherwise are not available. Watch a youngster going down the street. He may be galloping as though he were a horse. If he were just walking, he might be a little bored. The galloping brings up life energy.”
“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
“It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”
“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”
“When you set sail for Ithaca, wish for the road to be long, full of adventures, full of knowledge.”
“Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.”
“I live for coincidences. They briefly give to me the illusion or the hope that there's a pattern to my life, and if there's a pattern, then maybe I'm moving toward some kind of destiny where it's all explained.”
“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
“A real Christian is an odd number, anyway.
He feels supreme love for One whom he has never seen;
talks familiarly everyday to someone he cannot see;
expects to go to heaven on the virtue of another;
empties himself in order to be full;
admits he is wrong so he can be declared right;
goes down in order to get up;
is strongest when he is weakest;
richest when he is poorest;
happiest when he feels the worst.
He dies so he can live;
forsakes in order to have;
gives away so he can keep;
sees the invisible;
hears the inaudible;
“A lion in God’s cause must be a lamb in his own.”
“We allow in our minds what we would not allow in our actions, because other people cannot see our thoughts.”
“For all of us the way into the promised land passes through the night, that we too only enter it as those strangely marked with scars from the struggle with God, the struggle for God’s kingdom and grace; that we enter into the land of God and of our brother as limping warriors.”
“If a commission by an earthly king is considered an honor, how can a commission by a Heavenly King be considered a sacrifice?”
“There is no delusion like the folly of believing that a course of sin will conduce to our happiness.”
“Nobody can do as much damage to the church of God as the man who is within its walls, but not within its life.”
“What else does this longing and helplessness proclaim, but that there was once in each person a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? We try to fill this in vain with everything around us, seeking in things that are not there the help we cannot find in those that are there. Yet none can change things, because this infinite abyss can only be filled with something that is infinite and unchanging—in other words, God himself. God alone is our true good.”
“There is no greater snare in the Christian life than to forget the Person Himself and to live simply on truths concerning Him.”
“He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.”
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