A collection of quotes which I felt were profound or impactful or which in some way inspired me.

Updated: 06/Aug/2007 0:21; “The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted.” — Charles H. Spurgeon

Select quotes from:
- Aristotle
- Augustine, Aurelius
- Bonar, Horatius
- Bonhoeffer, Dietrich
- Brengle, Samuel Logan
- Bridges, Jerry
- Bunyan, John
- Burch, Mark
- Calvin, John
- Carson, Donald A.
- Cervinka, Mitch
- Chesterton, G. K.
- Churchill, Winston
- Day, Dorothy
- Elderidge, John
- Emerson, Ralph W.
- Fortner, Don
- Gill, John
- Griffith, Arthur Leonard
- Gunn, Grover
- Hauerwas, Stanley
- Hodge, Charles
- Holmberg, Eric
- Kreeft, Peter
- Kung, Hans
- Kushner, Harold
- Lewis, Clive S.
- Little, Paul E.
- Luther, Martin
- Mansfield, Stephen
- Muggeridge, Malcolm
- Ortberg, John
- Packer, James I.
- Pink, Arthur W.
- Piper, John
- Reagan, Ronald W.
- Smart, David G.
- Spencer, Herbert
- Sproul, Robert C.
- Spurgeon, Charles Haddon
- Tertullian
- Thornton, Lionel Spencer
- Tillich, Paul
- Tozer, Aiden W.
- Warfield, Benjamin B.
- White, James R.
- Whitefield, George
- Wright, Nicholas Thomas
- Yancey, Philip
- Zacharias, Ravi

————————————————————————
ARISTOTLE

It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible.

How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Wit is educated insolence.

————————————————————————
AUGUSTINE, Aurelius

Nothing, therefore, happens unless the Omnipotent wills it to happen: he either permits it to happen, or he brings it about himself.

Miracles do not happen in contradiction to nature, but only in contradiction to that which is known to us in nature.

————————————————————————
BONAR, Horatius

I do not deny that in conversion man himself wills . . . [But] is man willing because he has made himself so, or because God has made him so? . . . What arguments can you expect to prevail with a man who refuses the Gospel? Admit that there are other arguments, yet the man is set against them all. There is not one argument that can be used which he does not hate. His will resists and rejects every persuasion and motive. How, then, is this resistance to be overcome, this opposition made to give way? How is the bent of the will to be so altered as to receive that which it rejected? Plainly by his will coming in contact with a Superior one, a will that can remove the resistance, a will such as that which said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. The will itself must undergo a change before it can choose that which it rejected. And what can change it but the finger of God?

For we know that the unrenewed will is set against the Gospel; it is enmity to God and His truth. The more closely and clearly truth is set before it, and pressed home upon it, its hatred swells and rises. The presentation of truth, however forcible and clear—even though that truth regarded the grace of God—will only exasperate the unconverted man. It is the Gospel that he hates; the more clearly it is set before him, he hates it the more. It is God that he hates; the more vividly God is set before him, the more does his enmity awaken and augment. Surely that which stirs up enmity cannot of itself remove it.

————————————————————————
BONHOEFFER, Dietrich

Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy.

————————————————————————
BRENGLE, Samuel Logan

If I appear to be great in their eyes, the Lord is most graciously helping me to see how absolutely nothing I am without Him and helping me to keep little in my own eyes. He does use me. But I’m so concerned that He uses me and that it is not of me the work is done. The ax cannot boast of the trees it has cut down. It could do nothing but for the woodsman. He made it, he sharpened it, he used it. The moment he throws it aside it becomes only old iron. Oh, that I may never lose sight of this. The spiritual leader of today is in all probability one who yesterday expressed his humility by working gladly and faithfully in second place.

————————————————————————
BRIDGES, Jerry

There are thousands of professing Christians who think they have been justified, who think their sins are forgiven and that they are on their way to heaven, who show no evidence of the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit in their lives.

Our first problem is that our attitude towards sin is more self-centered than God-centered . . . We cannot tolerate failure in our struggle with sin chiefly because we are success-oriented, not because we know it is offensive to God.

————————————————————————
BUNYAN, John

The man who does not know the nature of the law cannot know the nature of sin, and he who does not know the nature of sin cannot know the nature of the Savior.

————————————————————————
BURCH, Mark

The essence of worldy religion is man’s attempt to somehow convince himself he’s jumped through enough hoops for God to give him the approving nod. Such religion is what rushes in to fill the vacuum created by the absence of intimacy with God.

————————————————————————
CALVIN, John

We can only begin an upright course of life when God, of his good pleasure, adopts us into his family.

For until men recognize that they owe everything to God, that they are nourished by His fatherly care, that He is the Author of their every good, that they should seek nothing beyond Him—they will never yield Him willing service. Nay, unless they establish their complete happiness in Him, they will never give themselves truly and sincerely to Him.

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.

The Holy Spirit teaches us in Scripture that our mind is smitten with so much blindness, that the affections of our heart are so depraved and perverted, that our whole nature is vitiated, that we can do nothing but sin until he forms a new will within us.

Man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God’s Majesty.

It is not after we were reconciled by the blood of his Son that God began to love us, but before the foundation of the world.

If the Lord himself teaches that the Church will struggle with the burden of countless sinners until the day of judgement, it is obviously futile to look for a Church totally free from faults.

————————————————————————
CARSON, Donald A.

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

————————————————————————
CERVINKA, Mitch

It is generally true that in order to be responsible a man must have the physical ability and mental capacity to do what is right. Calvinism fully confesses that fallen men have the physical strength to keep God’s commandments and the mental capacity to understand what God’s commands require of them. In fact, this is the very reason why unregenerate men often react so violently against God’s word—they do understand what it says, and they don’t like it! The problem with fallen man is not in his physical abilities, nor in his mental capacity to understand. Rather, man’s problem lies in the desires of his heart—he loves sin and hates righteousness—and this is what makes him guilty for his sins. He could obey God’s law if he desired to do so. He could trust in Christ if he had any love for God. Man is guilty for the simple reason that, in his sinful rebellion, he refuses to do that which he has the full mental and physical ability to do. His problem is a moral and spiritual problem—he is a sinner at heart, who has no desire for God or godliness.

————————————————————————
CHESTERTON, G. K.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.

These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the swing of the pendulum; that is, the idea that man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind.

It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.

Any number of people assume that the Bible says that Eve ate an apple, or that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Yet the Bible never says a word about whales or apples . . . It is unfair to turn round and blame the Bible because of all these legends and jokes and journalistic allusions, which are read into the Bible by people who have not read the Bible.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home.

I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

————————————————————————
CHURCHILL, Winston

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

————————————————————————
DAY, Dorothy

I really only love God as much as the person I love the least.

————————————————————————
ELDERIDGE, John

Something awful has happened, something terrible. Something worse, even, than the fall of man; for in that greatest of all tragedies, we merely lost Paradise and with it everything that made life worth living. What has happened since is unthinkable: we’ve gotten used to it. We’re broken in to the idea that this is just the way things are. The people who walk in great darkness have adjusted their eyes.

The meaning of our lives is revealed through experiences that at first seem at odds with each other—moments we wish would never end and moments we wish had never begun. Those timeless experiences we want to last forever whisper to us that they were meant to.

Things appear to have come full circle. The promise of life and the invitation to desire have again been lost beneath a pile of religious teachings that put the focus on knowledge and performance . . . The gospels are described today as ‘gospels of sin management.’ Sin is the bottom line, and we have the cure. Typically, it is a system of knowledge or performance, or a mixture of both. Those in the knowledge camp put the emphasis on getting our doctrine in line. ‘Right belief’ is seen as the means to life. Desire is irrelevant; content is what matters. But notice this—the Pharisees knew more about the Bible than most of us ever will, and it hardened their hearts. Knowledge just isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you are familiar with the biblical narrative, you will remember that there were two special trees in Eden—the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life. We got the wrong tree. We got knowledge, and it hasn’t done us much good. . . . We don’t need more facts, and we certainly don’t need more things to do. We need Life, and we’ve been looking for it ever since we lost Paradise. Jesus appeals to our desire because he came to speak to it. When we abandon desire, we no longer hear or understand what he is saying.

Christianity has come to the point where we believe that there is no higher aspiration for the human soul than to be nice. We are producing a generation of men and women whose greatest virtue is that they don’t offend anyone. Then we wonder why there is not more passion for Christ. How can we hunger and thirst after righteousness if we have ceased hungering and thirsting altogether? . . . A curious warning is given to us in Peter’s first epistle. There he tells us to be ready to give the reason for the hope that lies within us to everyone who asks. Now, what’s strange about that passage is this: no one ever asks . . . Yet God tells us to be ready, so what’s wrong? To be blunt, nothing about our lives is worth asking about.

————————————————————————
EMERSON, Ralph W.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

————————————————————————
FORTNER, Don

The surest thing that can be said about good works is this: those who think they have them do not, and those who perform them are fully convinced that they haven’t (Matt. 25:31-46).

I have searched the Scriptures from cover to cover repeatedly, marking with a bold green marker every place where God says something good about humanity. There are no green marks in my Bible.

The past we can never recall. Tomorrow may never come. This is the day the Lord has made for us. Let us rejoice and serve him in it.

The Son of God became the Son of Man so that the sons of men might become the sons of God!

The providence of God will never take you where the grace of God will not sustain, keep, and bless you.

The believer is a mystery to others and a mystery to himself, too. He is sanctified, yet he feels himself to be the chief of sinners. He loves God’s law, yet he wrestles with an inward desire to have his own way. He loves Christ, yet he weeps over his lack of love for his Redeemer. He believes God, yet his heart aches because of his horrid unbelief. He has great sorrow and heaviness of heart because of his sin, yet he rejoices in the Lord always. His spirit longs to be with Christ, yet his flesh clings to the earth. He knows that he is secure in Christ, yet he examines his faith continually.”

My relationship with God determines what I do, but what I do does not in any way determine my relationship with God.

Worship is more than an act of devotion and more than a religious ceremony. Worship is the submission and consecration of ourselves and all things to the will and glory of our God.

Indifference is the most horrible, inexcusable evil to be found in a believer . . . Indifference to Christ is the first step of apostasy from Christ. God, save me from indifference.

————————————————————————
GILL, John

[The grace of the Spirit in regeneration] is powerful and irresistable; it carries all before it; there is no withstanding it; it throws down Satan’s strongholds, demolishes the fortifications of sin; the whole possé of Hell, and the corruptions of a man’s heart, are not a match for it. When the Spirit works, who can let?

————————————————————————
GRIFFITH, Arthur Leonard

Satan tempts us at the point of our ambitions; not that we might engage in positive evil but simply accept the fact of evil, learn to live with it, come to terms with it, and maintain a discreet silence in the presence of it. Satan tempts us at the point of our religion; not that we might disbelieve in God but that we might demand certainty—that kind of certainty of God that leaves nothing to faith, nothing to God himself.

————————————————————————
GUNN, Grover

The object of saving faith in the Old Testament was the same as the object of saving faith in the New Testament, although admittedly the Old Testament saint had much less knowledge of Christ. He saw dimly through the Messianic prophecies and types. The object of faith has not changed through the dispensations; the degree of knowledge of the object has.

To say that logic and science are God-neutral common ground is to deny the existence of the sovereign God of Scripture for whom and through whom and to whom are all things. To say that the impersonal axioms of logic and science are the most basic principles of reality is to deny the Christ who is before all things, and in whom all things consist . . . In its quest for common ground with the skeptic, evidentialism makes concessions that compromise the very essence of Biblical Christianity . . . Not only does evidentialism concede too much, it seeks to prove too little. The most evidentialism claims to be able to do is to prove the probable truth of Christianity. But if Christianity is only probably true, then Christianity is also possibly false.

Apart from the regenerating grace of God, [fallen man] will continue to cling to his lie . . . that finite man and pagan gods really are an adequate foundation for a meaningful world. Or he will sink into intellectual skepticism and arrogantly boast of his ability to live in a meaningless world without resorting to the psychological crutch of Christianity. Or, more commonly, he will find some dialectical mix of false faith and proud despair. All the Christian can do is to argue from the Bible that the man who says there is no Jehovah God is truly a fool and that the forbidden fruit will indeed turn to gravel in his mouth. We plead and argue, but only God can cause the blind to see and the deaf to hear.

The apologist can argue transcendentally that human logic and science have no adequate foundation apart from the Word of the true and living God. [What he cannot do is] make human logic and science his self-authenticating authorities and then use these to prove God. Logic and science derive their authenticity and authority from God, not vice versa . . . Evidence must be presented in the defining context of the gospel message. We must reject the notion that we can somehow use evidence and logical arguments apart from the gospel context to prepare the skeptic’s heart and mind for the gospel message. It is in the context of the preached Word that God works His work of regenerating grace which enables the spiritually blind to see and believe.

————————————————————————
HAUERWAS, Stanley

I am angry at Christians, including myself, for allowing ourselves to be so compromised that the world can no longer tell what difference it makes to worship the Trinity.

The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesar’s.

————————————————————————
HODGE, Charles

All moral obligation resolves itself into the obligation of conformity to the will of God.

————————————————————————
HOLMBERG, Eric

While the law is not the gospel, the gospel is not lawless.

————————————————————————
KREEFT, Peter

The good news [of the gospel] makes no sense unless you believe the bad news first . . . Once, the main obstacle to believe in Christianity was the good news; it seemed like a fairy tale, too good to be true. Today, the main obstacle is the bad news; people just don’t believe in sin, even though that is the only Christian doctrine that can be proven . . . Humanity is a good thing gone bad, the image of God in rebellion against God.

————————————————————————
KUNG, Hans

The Christian believes, not in the Bible, but in Him whom it attests; the Christian believes, not in tradition, but in Him whom it transmits; the Christian believes, not in the Church, but in Him whom it proclaims.

————————————————————————
KUSHNER, Harold

Paul, whose conversation with me ultimately flowered into this book, assured me that while he did not believe in religion, he believed in God. I asked him what he meant by that, and he told me that when he contemplates the beauty and intricacy of the world, he has to believe that God exists. That’s very nice, I told him, and I’m sure God appreciates your vote of confidence. But for the religious mind and soul, the issue has never been the existence of God but the importance of God, the difference that God makes in the way we live. To believe that God exists the way that you believe the South Pole exists, though you have never seen either one, to believe in the reality of God the way you believe in the Pythagorean theorem as an accurate abstract statement that does not really affect your daily life, is not a religious stance. A God who exists but does not matter, who does not make a difference in the way you live, might as well not exist.

Losing faith in a childish understanding of God is not the same as losing faith in God.

————————————————————————
LEWIS, Clive S.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance. And if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

Now of course we must agree with Hume, that if there is absolutely ‘uniform experience’ against miracles, if, in other words, they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately, we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.

God is basic Fact or Actuality, the source of all other facthood. At all costs therefore He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. If He exists at all, He is the most concrete thing there is, the most individual, “organized and minutely articulated.” He is unspeakable not by being indefinite but by being too definite for the unavoidable vagueness of language.

If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, Thy will be done, and those to whom God says in the end, Thy will be done.

For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline and virtue. For the modern mind, the cardinal problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of man.

The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and present an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.

In the long run the answer, to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: ‘What are you asking God to do?’ To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.

We may think God wants actions of a certain kind, but God wants people of a certain kind.

It is since Christians have begun thinking less of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this one. Aim at heaven and you get earth thrown in; aim at earth and you get neither.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be a lunatic—on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg . . . Either this man was, and is, the Son of God or else a madman or something worse . . . But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being merely a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

The demand that God should forgive such a man while he remains what he is, is based on a confusion between condoning and forgiving. To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.

You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

People make excuses for not keeping the law of God, which is proof how deeply they believe in the law.

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word darkness on the walls of his cell.

When it comes to knowing God, the initiative lies on his side. If he does not show himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find him.

————————————————————————
LITTLE, Paul E.

We are not sinners because we sin—we sin because we are sinners.

Belief doesn’t create truth but enables us to enter into what is already true.

Faith goes beyond reason, not against reason.

————————————————————————
LUTHER, Martin

Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason—for I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have often erred and contradicted each other—I stand convicted by the Scriptures to which I have appealed, and my conscience is taken captive by God’s word. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.

I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.

There is no justification without sanctification, no forgiveness without renewal of life, no real faith from which the fruits of new obedience do not grow.

I have made a covenant with God that he sends me neither visions, dreams, nor even angels. I am well satisfied with the gift of the Holy Scriptures, which give me abundant instruction and all I need to know both for this life and for that which is to come.

The mystery of the humanity of Christ, that he sunk himself into our flesh, is beyond all human understanding.

————————————————————————
MANSFIELD, Stephen

The truth is, God is God and he can do whatever he wants. His job description is to do whatever pleases him. That’s how he makes decisions, that’s how he conducts himself: according to his own good pleasure, as Scripture says. Now that’s good news to the believer, but it’s bad news to those who are rebelling against God.

While I applaud the pastor who teaches his people about the failings of the Da Vinci Code, I also have to ask if that same pastor has ever taught his congregation the foundations of their faith so that assaults on the faith like the DaVinci Code are easily recognized as error . . . It is entertaining error, but it is perceived as a threat by most Christians largely because they have not been taught enough in their churches to inoculate them from such error . . . Christians have a choice: master their truth and skillfully contend in the marketplace of ideas or, in time, perish. It is that simple. If we choose the former, Dan Brown may have done us a favor.

————————————————————————
MUGGERIDGE, Malcolm

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

There is in each of us a hard core of pride or self-centeredness which corrupts our best achievements and blights our best experiences. It comes out in all sorts of ways — in the jealousy which spoils our friendships, in the vanity we feel when we have done something pretty good, in the easy conversion of love into lust, in the meanness which makes us depreciate the efforts of other people, in the distortion of our own judgment by our own self-interest, in our fondness for flattery and our resentment of blame, in our self-assertive profession of fine ideals which we never begin to practice.

————————————————————————
ORTBERG, John

For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it.

————————————————————————
PACKER, James I.

You are not strong enough to fall away while God is resolved to hold you.

————————————————————————
PINK, Arthur W.

By nature [man] possesses natural ability but lacks moral and spiritual ability. The fact that he does not possess the latter does not destroy his responsibility, because his responsibility rests upon the fact that he does possess the former.

The nature of Christ’s salvation is woefully misrepresented by the present-day evangelist [who] announces a Savior from hell rather than a Savior from sin. And that is why so many are fatally deceived, for there are multitudes who wish to escape the Lake of Fire who have no desire to be delivered from their carnality and worldliness.

We cannot grasp the true meaning of the divine holiness by thinking of someone or something very pure and then raising the concept to the highest degree we are capable of. God’s holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered. We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable. The natural man is blind to it. He may fear god’s power and admire His wisdom, but His holiness he cannot even imagine.

There is no way that we by ourselves can generate sanctification. Our sanctification is Christ. There is no way we can be good. Our goodness is Christ. There is no way we can be holy. Our holiness is Christ.

The will is not sovereign; it is a servant, because it is influenced and controlled by the other faculties of man’s being. The will is not free because the man is the slave of sin.

————————————————————————
PIPER, John

The task of all Christian scholarship—not just biblical studies—is to study reality as a manifestation of God’s glory, to speak and write about it with accuracy, and to savor the beauty of God in it. It is a massive abdication of scholarship that so many Christians do academic work with so little reference to God.

I never tire of saying and savoring the truth that God’s passion to be glorified and our passion to be satisfied are one experience in the Christ-exalting act of worship.

The wisdom of God has ordained a way for the love of God to deliver us from the wrath of God without compromising the justice of God.

We will never fully appreciate what a deep and awesome thing conversion is until we own up to the fact that it is a miracle.

Once we had no delight in God, and Christ was just a vague historical figure. What we enjoyed was food and friendships and productivity and investments and vacations and hobbies and games and reading and shopping and sex and sports and art and TV and travel… but not God. He was an idea—even a good one—and a topic for discussion; but he was not a treasure of delight.

Could there be any holy motivation to believe in Christ where there is no taste for the beauty of Christ? To be sure we could be motivated by the desire to escape hell, or the desire to have material riches, or the desire to rejoin a departed loved one. But how does it honor the light when the only reason we come to the light is to find those things that we loved in the dark? Is this saving faith?

[It's a stumbling block for many people] to assert that we are responsible to do what we are morally unable to do. . . It may help, however, to consider that the inability we speak of is not owing to a physical handicap, but to moral corruption. Our inability to believe is not the result of a physically damaged brain but of a morally perverted will. Physical inability would remove accountability. Moral inability does not.

If God should turn away from himself as the Source of infinite joy, he would cease to be God. He would deny the infinite worth of his own glory. He would imply that there is something more valuable outside himself. He would commit idolatry. . . Where will we find a Rock of integrity in the universe when the heart of God has ceased to value supremely the supremely valuable?

————————————————————————
REAGAN, Ronald W.

Do we really think that we can have it both ways, that God will protect us in a time of crisis even as we turn away from Him in our day-to-day life?

————————————————————————
SMART, David G.

We have this peculiar habit of speaking about things like logic and knowledge and morals as though they are more than just expressions of biochemical states, that they have some form of correspondence with the external world. If that is our consistent experience, shouldn’t our worldview manage to account for it?

Truth has a rather persistent character that cares little for idiosyncratic beliefs.

Truth is not determined by emotional attractiveness. The truth of God is not rendered false by the hurt feelings of sinful men.

[The reprobate's] problem is not an intellectual one. It is a moral and spiritual problem; he is hostile toward God, living in open rebellion against him. His intellectual objections are just disingenuous facades behind which he hides his obdurate rebellion, a fact made plainly evident by his clutching to his worldview even after you have stripped him of his every Christ-denying pretension.

An unsupported conclusion is just an assumption trying to look presentable. Conclusions are drawn from arguments, not thin air. The burden of proof is your duty to expose the argument from which your conclusion is drawn.

I personally find it distasteful that someone could describe the number of the redeemed by the pejorative “a few,” when consideration is given to the facts that: all mankind have sinned, lie under the curse, and deserve eternal death; that “God would have done injustice to no one if He had willed to leave the whole human race in sin and under the curse, and to condemn it on account of its sin”; yet from this mass of condemned sinners, God chose to save any at all . . . If he had redeemed only five, that still would have been a number far exceeding those who deserved redemption—zero. But he redeemed a multitude so large it cannot be numbered. That is not “a few.” On my view, the mercy of God in redeeming anyone at all is at once humbling, shocking, glorious, and a cause for unending praise. Calling the number of redeemed “a few” is, in my opinion, a dramatic failure to recognize our mortal condition, God’s unapproachable holiness, and the astounding nature of his mercy.

There is no morally neutral holding area; man does not exist in a state of spiritual limbo from which either ‘belief’ or ‘non-belief’ finally determines his standing before God, whether justified or condemned. According to Scripture, it is not man’s unbelief that condemns him; rather, it is his sin that condemns him and in his unbelief—itself a sin—he remains condemned therein. No man is ever in a neutral state; all mankind exists in a state of condemnation on account of sin. Those who belong to God, in their day of salvation, move from death to life, from darkness to light. We all come from the same pool of death and darkness, of sin and moral ruin—and through unbelief, itself a sin, man remains there. We exist in death; only in Christ do we move to life. We exist in darkness; only in Christ do we move to light. We exist under God’s wrath; only in Christ is that wrath removed. We exist in condemnation; only in Christ are we justified.

Since Christ bore the full penalty of God’s judgment against sin on behalf of those for whom he died, God is able to extend mercy to them without compromising his justice.

We are each of us by nature a spiritual Lazarus, dead and entombed in the darkness of sin. All those chosen by God and belonging to him are, in due time, called forth to life from the tomb of sin.

Scripture is a vehicle of revelation, not an object of worship.

Since God would have been just in delivering all mankind over to destruction, the fact that he saves any at all is a testimony to his unspeakable and glorious mercy.

Investigating reality itself is the discipline of metaphysics. Science tells us about nature. Metaphysics tells us about reality. Of course, you might be tempted to say that the material cosmos is the extent of reality, that this universe and everything in it is all that exists, but that would be a metaphysical conclusion, not a scientific one.

Most Christians often talk about how amazing God’s grace is, but it does not make sense. If it is the sinner’s act of will which determines whether or not God applies that saving grace, and if Christ’s suffering and death on the cross made salvation merely possible, and if its efficacy is determined by that sinner’s act of will—then what exactly is so amazing?

Properly speaking, freedom ought to be predicated of persons, not faculties; i.e. the ‘agent’ is free, not his ‘will’.

Man’s will is indeed free, insofar as his choices are a product of his own intellect, motivated by his own desires, influenced by his own character and heart. But it is for those precise same reasons that man’s will is not free. How is this so? Man’s character, intellect, and desires—which in concert are the basis of his will—are altogether corrupted under the bondage of sin. Man’s choices are not made contrary to his desire but, rather, are in fact a product of his desires. Choice is a function of man’s will; his will is a function of his mind and heart; his mind and heart are corrupted in sin. Consequently, the degree to which man’s will is free is directly proportional to the degree to which man is free from his sinful nature. And for the unregenerate sinner, he is not free from his sinful nature at all. Such freedom is found in Christ only.

Christianity tells you that there is nothing you can do to get to heaven—and it’s the only religion that does so. In every other religion of the world (in which ’salvation’ is a meaningful term) you are told what you must do to get to heaven, so to speak. Christianity is the only religion in the world which says there is nothing you can do to get to heaven, because Christianity is the only religion in the world which takes God that seriously, and his holiness even more seriously.

The pursuit of truth for the postmodernist is necessarily an exercise in futility, for truth is reduced to the level of opinion and error has ceased to exist.

I think the Bible is an eloquent portrait of things human language could not contain; it is not the truth so much as it is a tangible portrait of the truth. Consider a still-life painting—the canvas, the brush strokes, the paint—it is not the object but rather a portrait of the object. The reality is far more than mere paint could ever contain.

Yesterday science was in the hands of religion; today religion is in the hands of science. It’s simply the opposite arc of this swinging pendulum.

————————————————————————
SPENCER, Herbert

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. That principle is contempt prior to investigation.

————————————————————————
SPROUL, Robert C.

Men and women who refuse to ackowledge God’s existence do so, in the final analysis, because it is contrary to their manner of living. They do not want to bow to the moral claims of a holy God on their lives.

————————————————————————
SPURGEON, Charles Haddon

I had rather believe a limited atonement that is efficacious for all men for whom it was intended, than a universal atonement that is not efficacious for anybody.

It is a good thing God chose me before I was born, because he surely would not have afterwards.

I might preach to you for ever, I might borrow the eloquence of Demosthenes or of Cicero, but ye will not come unto Christ. I might beg of you on my knees, with tears in my eyes, and show you the horrors of hell and the joys of heaven, the sufficiency of Christ, and your own lost condition, but you would none of you come unto Christ of yourselves unless the Spirit that rested on Christ should draw you. It is true of all men in their natural condition that they will not come unto Christ.

He who counts the stars and calls them by their names, is in no danger of forgetting His own children. He knows your case as thoroughly as if you were the only creature He ever made, or the only saint He ever loved.

The grandest fact under heaven is this: that Christ by his precious blood does actually put away sin, and that God, for Christ’s sake, dealing with men on terms of divine mercy, forgives the guilty and justifies them, not according to anything that he sees in them or foresees will be in them, but according to the riches of his mercy which lie in his own heart.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

The proper study of the Christian is the Godhead. The highest science, the loftiest speculation, the mightiest philosophy, which can ever engage the attention of a child of God is the name, the nature, the person, the work, the doings, and the existence of the great God whom he calls the Father.

The day we find the perfect church, it becomes imperfect the moment we join it.

There is nothing in man by nature, being apart from God, which is not vile and deceitful. In me (that is, in my flesh) dwells no good thing. If there be anything good in my nature, if I have been transformed by the renewing of my mind, if I am regenerate, if I have passed from death unto life, if I have been taken out of the family of Satan and adopted into the family of God’s dear Son, if I am no longer an heir of wrath but a child of heaven, then all these things are of God, and in no sense, and in no degree whatever, are they of myself.

Beware of no man more than of yourself. We carry our worst enemies within us.

Free will carried many a soul to hell, but never a soul to heaven.

Evangelical repentance is repentance of sin as sin: not of this sin nor of that, but of the whole mass. We repent of the sin of our nature as well as the sin of our practice. We bemoan sin within us and without us. We repent of sin itself as being an insult to God. Anything short of this is a mere surface repentance, and not a repentance which reaches to the bottom of the mischief. Repentance of the evil act, and not of the evil heart, is like men pumping water out of a leaky vessel, but forgetting to stop the leak. Some would dam up the stream, but leave the fountain still flowing; they would remove the eruption from the skin, but leave the disease in the flesh.

Sin is never destroyed except by faith in Jesus. All your meditations upon the evil of sin, and all your shiverings at the punishment of it, and all your soul-humblings and prostrations will never kill sin. It is at the cross that God has set up a mighty gibbet upon which He hangeth sin for ever, and putteth it to death; it is there at Golgotha, but only there.

Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the book widens and deepens with our years.

My hope arises from the freedom of grace, and not from the freedom of the will.

Rebellion against divine election is often founded on the idea that the sinner has a sort of right to be saved, and this is to deny the full desert of sin.

The Arminians say, ‘Christ died for all men.’ Ask them what they mean by it: Did Christ die so as to secure the salvation of all men? They say, ‘No, certainly not.’ We ask them the next question: Did Christ die so as to secure the salvation of any man in particular? They say, ‘No.’ And they are obliged to admit this if they are consistent; they say, ‘No, Christ has died so that any man may be saved if…’—and then follow with certain conditions of salvation . . . Now who is it that limits the death of Christ? Why, it is you. We say Christ so died that He infallibly secured the salvation of a multitude that no man can number, who through Christ’s death not only may be saved, but are saved, must be saved, and cannot by any possibility run the hazard of being anything but saved. You are welcome to your atonement; you may keep it. We will never renounce ours for the sake of it.

A redemption which pays a price but does not secure that which is purchased, a redemption which calls Christ a substitute for the sinner but yet which allows the person to suffer, is altogether unworthy of our apprehensions of Almighty God . . . We could not and would not receive such a travesty of divine truth as that would be.

I believe that Christ came into the world, not to put men into a salvable state, but into a saved state, not to put them where they could save themselves, but to do the work in them and for them, from first to last.

Long ago I ceased to count heads. Truth is usually in the minority in this evil world. I have faith in the Lord Jesus for myself—a faith burnt into me as with a hot iron. I thank God; what I believe I shall believe, even if I believe it alone.

Believers in Christ’s atonement are now in declared union with those who make light of it. Believers in Holy Scripture are in confederacy with those who deny plenary inspiration. Those who hold evangelical doctrine are in open alliance with those who call the Fall a fable, who deny the personality of the Holy Ghost, who call justification by faith immoral, and hold that there is another probation after death. Yes, we have before us the wretched spectacle of professedly orthodox Christians publicly avowing their union with those who deny the faith, and scarcely concealing their contempt for those who cannot be guilty of such gross disloyalty to Christ. To be very plain, we are unable to call these things Christian Unions. They begin to look like Confederacies in Evil . . . It is our solemn conviction that where there can be no real spiritual communion there should be no pretense of fellowship. Fellowship with known and vital error is participation in sin.

The doctrines of original sin, election, effectual calling, final perseverance, and all those great truths which are called Calvinism (although Calvin was not the author of them but simply an able writer and preacher upon the subject) are, I believe, the essential doctrines of the Gospel that is in Jesus Christ. Now, I do not ask you whether you believe all this—it is possible you may not—but I believe you will before you enter heaven.

I believe the man who is not willing to submit to the electing love and sovereign grace of God, has great reason to question whether he is a Christian at all, for the spirit that kicks against that is the spirit of the devil, and the spirit of the unhumbled, unrenewed heart.

Our Arminian antagonists always leave the fallen angels out of the question: for it is not convenient to them to recollect this ancient instance of Election. They call it unjust that God should choose one man and not another. By what reasoning can this be unjust when they will admit that it was righteous enough in God to choose one race, the race of men, and leave another race, the race of angels, to be sunk into misery on account of sin.

Recollect also that God himself did not foresee that there would be in us any love to him arising out of ourselves, for there never has been any, and there never will be. He only foresaw that we should believe because he gave us faith, he foresaw that we should repent because his Spirit would work repentance in us, he foresaw that we should love because he wrought that love within us, and is there anything in the foresight that he means to give us such things that can account for his giving us such things? The case is self-evident—his foresight of what he means to do cannot be his reason for doing it.

There was nothing more in Abraham than in any one of us why God should have selected him, for whatever good was in Abraham God put it there. Now, if God put it there, the motive for his putting it there could not be the fact of his putting it there.

Our Saviour has bidden us to preach the gospel to every creature. He has not said, ‘Preach it only to the elect.’ That might seem to be the most logical thing for us to do, but since he has not been pleased to stamp ‘The Elect’ on their foreheads or to put any distinctive mark upon them, it would be an impossible task for us to perform. Whereas, when we preach the gospel to every creature, the gospel makes its own division, and Christ’s sheep hear his voice and follow him.

————————————————————————
TERTULLIAN

Certainly nothing is difficult for God: but if in our assumptions we so rashly make use of this judgment, we shall be able to invent any manner of thing concerning God, as that he has done it, on the ground that he was able to do it.

————————————————————————
THORNTON, Lionel Spencer

Belief and conduct are inextricably bound together.

————————————————————————
TILLICH, Paul

Reason is the presupposition of faith, and faith is the fulfillment of reason.
(Note: I have known of several people who did not understand what this quote was meaning to say, so for their sake I should like to provide an alternative rendering that may prove more apprehensible: “Faith presupposes reason, and reason finds its fulfillment in faith.”)

God is the answer to the question implied in man’s finitude; he is the name for that which concerns man ultimately. This does not mean that first there is a being called God and then the demand that man should be ultimately concerned about him. It means that whatever concerns a man ultimately becomes god for him and, conversely, it means that a man can be concerned ultimately only about that which is god for him.

A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing.

————————————————————————
TOZER, Aiden W.

Men do not become Christians by associating with church people, nor by religious contact, nor by religious education; they become Christians only by an invasion of their nature by the Spirit of God in the New Birth.

God is always previous, God is always there first, and if you have any desire for God, and for the things of God, it is God himself who put it there.

In God there is no ‘was’ or ‘will be’ but a continuous and unbroken ‘is’. In him history and prophecy are one and the same.

God in his wisdom is making evil men as well as good men, adverse things as well as favourable things, work for the bringing forth of his glory in the day when all shall be fulfilled in him.

I think that most Christians would be better pleased if the Lord did not inquire into their personal affairs too closely. They want Him to save them, to keep them happy, and to take them off to heaven at last, but not to be too inquisitive about their conduct or services.

I present to you a discredited doctrine that divides Christ. It goes like this: ‘Christ is indeed both Savior and Lord; yet a sinner may be saved by accepting Him as Savior without yielding to Him as Lord.’ The practical outworking of this doctrine is that the evangelist presents, and the seeker accepts, a divided Christ. Now, it seems odd that none of these teachers ever noticed that the only true object of saving faith is none other than Christ Himself—not the ’saviorhood’ of Christ nor the ‘lordship’ of Christ, but Christ Himself (1 Tim. 2:5). God does not offer salvation to the one who will believe on one of the offices of Christ, nor is an office of Christ ever presented as an object of faith . . . Paul did not tell people to believe on the Savior with the thought that they could later take up the matter of His lordship and settle it at their own convenience. To Paul there could be no division of offices. Christ must be—and is—Lord, or He will not be the Savior.

The fact is that we are not today producing saints. We are making converts to an effete type of Christianity that bears little resemblance to that of the New Testament.

The idea that God will pardon a rebel who has not given up his rebellion is contrary both to the Scriptures and to common sense.

Some who desire to be teachers of the Word, but who understand neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm, insist upon ‘naked’ faith as the only way to know spiritual things. By this they mean a conviction of the trustworthiness of the Word of God; a conviction, it may be noted, which the devils share with them. But the man who has been taught even slightly by the Spirit of Truth will rebel at this perversion. His language will be, ‘I have heard Him and observed Him. What have I to do any more with idols?’ For he cannot love a God who is no more than a deduction from a text.

The Christian is strong or weak depending upon how closely he has cultivated the knowledge of God.

I can safely say, on the authority of all that is revealed in the Word of God, that any man or woman on this earth who is bored and turned off by worship is not ready for heaven.

God knows instantly and effortlessly all matter and all matters, all mind and every mind, all spirit and all spirits, all being and every being, all creaturehood and all creatures, every plurality and all pluralities, all law and every law, all relations, all causes, all thoughts, all mysteries, all enigmas, all feeling, all desires, every unuttered secret, all thrones and dominions, all personalities, all things visible and invisible in heaven and in earth, motion, space, time, life, death, good, evil, heaven, and hell.

————————————————————————
WARFIELD, Benjamin B.

It is not faith in Christ that saves but Christ that saves through faith.

————————————————————————
WHITE, James R.

The doctrines of grace are the biblical teachings that define the goal and means of God’s perfect work of redemption. They tell us that God is the one who saves, for His own glory, and freely. And they tell us that He does so only through Christ, only on the basis of His grace, only with the perfection that marks everything the Father, Son, and Spirit do. The doctrines of grace separate the Christian faith from the works-based religions of men. They direct us away from ourselves and solely to God’s grace and mercy. They destroy pride, instill humility, and exalt God.

————————————————————————
WHITEFIELD, George

A true faith in Jesus Christ will not suffer us to be idle. No, it is an active, lively, restless principle; it fills the heart, so that it cannot be easy till it is doing something for Jesus Christ.

It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher.

————————————————————————
WRIGHT, Nicholas Thomas

Christianity has always said, with John 1:18, that nobody has ever seen God but that Jesus has revealed God. We shall only discover who the true and living God actually is if we take the risk of looking at Jesus himself. That is why the contemporary debates about Jesus are so important: they are also debates about God himself.

Just because our tradition tells us that the Bible says and means one thing or another, that does not excuse us from the challenging task of studying it afresh in the light of the best knowledge we have about its world and context, to see whether these things are indeed so.

My agenda is to go deeper into the meaning [of the gospel] than we have before and to come back to a restatement of the gospel that grounds the things we have believed about Jesus, about the cross, about the resurrection, about the incarnation, more deeply within their original setting.

————————————————————————
YANCEY, Philip

In many ways, sin is the punishment for sin. The more I choose against God’s design and give in to my sinful desires, the more I suffer—even if I never get caught, even if no one else knows.

The more I got to know Jesus, the more impressed I am by what Ivan Karamazov called ‘the miracle of restraint.’ The miracles Satan suggested, the signs and wonders the Pharisees demanded, the final proofs I yearn for — these would offer no serious obstacle to an omnipotent God. More amazing is his refusal to perform and to overwhelm. God’s terrible insistence on human freedom is so absolute that he granted us the power to live as though he did not exist, to spit on his face, to crucify him. All this Jesus must have known as he faced down the tempter in the desert, focusing his mighty power on the energy of restraint. I believe God insists on such restraint because no pyrotechnic displays of omnipotence will achieve the response he desires. Although power can force obedience, only love can summon a response of love, which is the one thing God wants from us and the reason he created us.

What blocks forgiveness is not God’s reticence but ours.

The proof of spiritual maturity is not how ‘pure’ you are but awareness of your impurity.

————————————————————————
ZACHARIAS, Ravi

People often say, ‘What about all the good things I’ve done? What about all the good people in this world?’ To this I must respond, ‘Jesus did not come into this world to make bad people good; he came into this world to make dead people live.

When Satan says to him, ‘Change these stones into bread and the world will follow you,’ Jesus says no, ‘It is written man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’ Humanity’s problems is not material, it is spiritual.

To argue for truth today is to stir an immediate debate, as if a heresy of devilish proportions has been invoked.

————————————————————————
UNKNOWN

History books can be dangerous things, especially when they are brilliantly written.

Satan doesn’t care if you believe in God. He does, however, care how much you love, trust and obey him.

hypocrite (noun) : someone who is not himself on Sundays.

Forks and spoons provide no nourishment. . . . The vitamins reside completely in the food; nevertheless, an eating utensil conducts the nourishment from the table to the tongue. Food brings life but a fork brings the food. Faith is the fork necessary for appropriating life, but the saving value of the life, resides solely in the food—i.e. in Christ, the Bread of Life.

Everyone who supported slavery was free. Everyone who supports abortion was born.