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Earth's crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God
But only he who sees takes off his shoes; the rest sit around it and pick blackberries
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
We won't need any one to condemn us at the bar of God; it will be our own conscience that will come up as a witness against us. God won't condemn us at his bar; we shall condemn ourselves. Memory is God's officer, and when He shall touch these secret springs and say, "Son, daughter, remember" - then tramp, tramp, tramp will come before us, in a long procession, all the sins we have ever committed. Do you think Cain has forgotten the face of his murdered brother, whom he killed six thousand years ago? Do you think Judas has forgotten that kiss with which he betrayed his Master, or the look that Master gave him as he said, "Betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?" Do you think these antediluvians have forgotten the Ark, and the flood that came and swept them all away? My friends, it is a good thing to be warned in time. Satan told Eve that she should not surely die; and there are many men and women now who think that all souls will at last be saved in spite of all their sins. Do you suppose those antediluvians who perished in Noah's day - those men too vile and sinful for the world - do you think God swept those men right into Heaven, and left Noah, the only righteous man, to struggle through the deluge? Do you think when the judgment came upon Sodom that those wicked men were taken right into the presence of God, and the only righteous man was left behind to suffer? There will be no tender, loving Jesus coming and offering you salvation there - no loving wife or mother to pray for you there. Many in that lost world would give millions, if they had them, if they had their mothers to pray them out of that place, but it will be too late. They have been neglecting salvation until the time has come when God say, "Cut them down; the day of mercy is ended." You laugh at the Bible; but how many there are in that lost world today who would give countless treasures if they had the blessed Bible there! You may make sport of Ministers, but bear in mind there will be no preaching of the Gospel there. Here they are God's messengers to you - loving friends that look after your soul. You may have some friends praying for your salvation today; but remember, you will not have one in that lost world. There will be no one to come and put his band on your shoulder and weep over you there and invite you to come to Christ.
- D.L. Moody (on the subject of hell)
For several decades, we psychologists have looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus and acclaimed our liberation from sin as epic making but at length we have discovered that to be free from sin, that is to have the excuse of being sick rather than being sinful, is to court the danger of also becoming lost. This danger i believe is betoken by the widespread interest in existentialism which we are witnessing. In becoming amoral, ethetically neutral and free, we have cut the very roots of our being, lost our deepest sense of selfhood and identity, and with neurotics themselves find ourselves asking "who am I?". "what is my deepest destiny?", and "what does living really mean?"
- Hobart Mowrer (an atheist)
Biblical truth, transcultural as it is, has an indispensable message for contemporary culture. It addresses modern learning, modern ethics, modern political and economic concerns and all the idolotries of our polytheistic society. It proclaims the gospel to a generation that is intellectually uncapped, morally unzippered, and volitionally uncurbed. Those who consider the latest fads permanently in will of course dismiss the Christian message as the last hoorah of an antiquated outlook. They reveal their sickness of soul by derrogating terms like morality, piety, family, work, patriotism, born again, evangelical, theology. Christianity- they dismiss as a kind of middle class hedonism. Declaring it intellectually inadmissable, they meanwhile espouse a life that niether reason nor conscience nor spirit can support or condone. Repression of sensuality and of self-gratification they call psychotically abnormal. Subordination of the flesh they leave to medieval monks or consign to the future ressurection. Affirming sexual pleasure to be the supreme good of a life of unending revelry, they waste away into unethical ghosts and skeletons.
- Carl F.H. Henry
The world's way to responding to intimations of decay is to engage equally in idiot hopes and idiot despair. On the one hand, some new policy or discovery is confidently expected to put everything to rights- a new fuel, a new drug, detente, world government. On the other hand, some disaster is as confidently expected to prove our undoing- capitalism will break down, fuel will run out, plutonium will lay us low, atomic waste will kill us off. Overpopulation will suffocate us or alternatively a declining birth rate will put us more at the mercy of our enemies. In Christian terms, such hopes and fears are equally beside the point, for as christians we know that here we have no continuing city, that crowns roll in the dust and every earthly kingdom must sometimes flounder whereas we acknowledge a king men did not crown and cannot dethrone, as we are citizens of a city of God they did not build and cannot destroy. Thus the apostle wrote to the christians in Rome, living in a society as depraved and as dissolute as ours, their games like our television specialized in spectacles of violence and eroticism. Paul exhorted them to be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in God's work, to concern themselves with the things that are unseen. For the things which are seen are temporal but the things which are not seen are eternal. It was in the breakdown of Rome that Christendom was born. Now in the breakdown of Christendom, there are the same requirements and the same possibilities to eschew the fantasy of a disintegrating world and to seek the reality of what is not seen and eternal- the reality of Christ.
- Malcolm Muggeridge
Yet even so, truth is very beautiful; more so, as i consider, than justice- today's pursuit- which easily puts on a false face. In the nearly seven decades i have lived through, the world has overflowed with bloodshed and explosions whose dust has never had time to settle before others have erupted; all in purportedly just causes. The quest for justice continues, and the weapons and the hatred pile up; but truth was an early casualty. The lies on behalf of which our wars have been fought and our peace treaties concluded. The lies of revolution and of counter-revolution! The lies of advertising, of news, of salesmanship, politics! The lies of the priest at his pulpit, the proffesor at his podium, the journalist at his typewriter! The lie stuck like a fish bone at the throat of the microphone, the hand-held lies of the prowling cameraman! Ignazio Silone told me once how, when he was a member of the old Comintern, some stratagen was under discussion, and a delegate, a newcomer who had never attended before, made the observation that if such and such a statement were to be put it out, it wouldn't be true. There was a moment of dazed silence, and then everyone began to laugh. They laughed and laughed until tears ran down their cheeks and the Kremlin walls seemed to shake. The same laughter echoes in every council chamber and cabinet room wherever two or more are gathered to exercise authority. It is truth that has died, not God!
- Malcolm Muggeridge
If we present man with a concept of man that is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present him as an automation of reflexes, as a mind machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instincts, heredity, and environment, we feed the despair to which any man is prone. I became acquainted with the last stages of corruption in my second concentration camp in Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment, or as the Nazis like to say "of blood and soil". I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek, were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or the other in Berlin, but rather at the desks of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.
- Viktor Frankl
The attackers of religion have forgotten that these large-scale slaughters at the hands of antitheists(Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, etc.) were the logical outworking of their God-denying philosophy. Contrastingly, the violence spawned by those who killed in the name of Christ would never have been sanctioned by the Christ of the Scriptures. Those who killed in the name of God were clearly self-serving politicizers of religion, an amalgam Christ ever resisted in His life and teaching. Their means and their message were in contradiction to the gospel. Atheism, on the other hand, provides the logical basis for an autonomous, domineering will, expelling morality.
- Ravi Zacharias
There is one vice in the world from which no man is free, which everyone loaths when he sees it in someone else and of which hardly any people except Christians ever imagine that they're guilty of themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad tempered or that they cannot keep their heads above girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think i have ever heard anyone who is not a Christian accuse himself of this vice of pride. It is the essential vice, the utmost evil. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison. It was through pride that the devil became the devil, for pride leads to every other vice. It is the complete anti-God state of mind.
- C.S. Lewis
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 either be a lunatic- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
- C.S. Lewis
Alexander, Caesar, Charlamagne, and myself founded empires; but what foundation did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded an empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
It always frustrated me that many Christians shy away from intellectual arguments. Many deem an intellectual defense unspiritual- as though all that matters is our religious experience, as though arguing on intellectual grounds weakens our faith. But anti-intellectualism is NOT more spiritual. The Bible explicitly commands us to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. If we fail, we will find it increasingly difficult to present the gospel, and we will lose our influence in the culture.
- Charles Colson
Between the hypothesis of God and the hypothesis of a cosmic bootstrap, there is no competition. We were always right to think that persons, or universes, who seek to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps are forever doomed to failure.
- Keith Ward
