My Faith

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====== Favorite Quotes ======
===== Brennan Manning - greatest cause of atheism =====
The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians: who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.

- Brennan Manning

===== Lee Strobel: the done plan =====
Christianity is unique. It’s based on the “done” plan—Jesus has done for us on the cross what we cannot do for ourselves: he has paid the death penalty that we deserve for our rebellion and wrongdoing, so we can become reconciled with God. I didn’t have to struggle and strive to try to do the impossible of making myself worthy. Over and over the Bible says that Jesus offers forgiveness and eternal life as a free gift that cannot be earned (see Rom. 6:23; Eph. 2:8–9; Titus 3:5). It’s called grace—amazing grace, unmerited favor. It’s available to anyone who receives it in a sincere prayer of repentance. Even someone like me.

- Lee Strobel, A Case for Christ

===== C.S. Lewis: Christ, not just a great teacher =====
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 . . . 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 patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

- C.S. Lewis

===== J.M.L. Monsabre: God's wisdom =====
If God would concede me His omnipotence for 24 hours, you would see how many changes I would make in the world. But if He gave me His wisdom too, I would leave things as they are.
- J.M.L. Monsabre

===== Frank Turek: Truth quest =====
Christians, think of one person in your life that you wish were a believer. Are they actively on a quest for truth or are they apathetic or even actively hostile? Most non-believers are not on a truth quest; they are on a happiness quest. They're not seeking God; they are running from Him.

- Frank Turek (paraphrased)

===== On the resurrection =====
On proof of the resurrection: It’s the ongoing encounter with the resurrected Christ that happens all over the world, in every culture, to people from all kinds of backgrounds and personalities—well educated and not, rich and poor, thinkers and feelers, men and women. They all will testify that more than any single thing in their lives, Jesus Christ has changed them.

- JP Moreland

If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably attested by the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole the size and shape of Resurrection, what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with?

- C. F. D. Moule

===== Scientists on Faith and God =====
Scientists' quotes about God: https://bibleapologetics.org/quotes-from-great-christian-scientists-on-god/

A chimp may share ninety-eight percent of its genes with a typical human being but it is certainly not ninety-eight percent human: it is not human at all – it is a chimp.
- Geneticist Steve Jones

Do not be afraid of being free thinkers. If you think strongly enough you will be forced by science to the belief in God, which is the foundation of all Religion. You will find science not antagonistic, but helpful to Religion.
- Lord Kelvin

Doubt is an unavoidable part of belief. In the words of Paul Tillich, “Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.” If the case in favor of belief in God were utterly airtight, then the world would be full of confident practitioners of a single faith. But imagine such a world, where the opportunity to make a free choice about belief was taken away by the certainty of the evidence. How interesting would that be?
-Francis S Collins

At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
-Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
-Galileo Galilei

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is. 
-Albert Einstein

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
-Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers


===== On church =====
The church is not a place for perfect people; it's a place for broken people slowly being made whole by Jesus.
-Clinton Arnold and Jeff Arnold

Man who does not attend church: I can't go to church, that place is full of hypocrites.
Response from church goer: That's okay buddy, we got room for one more!
- Frank Turek (paraphrase)

===== On Hell =====

In the first place, the Bible says that there are different degrees of punishment, so I’m not sure that it’s the same level of intensity for all people. In the second place, if God took his hands off this fallen world so that there were no restraints on human wickedness, we would make hell. Thus if you allow a whole lot of sinners to live somewhere in a confined place where they’re not doing damage to anyone but themselves, what do you get but hell? There’s a sense in which they’re doing it to themselves, and it’s what they want because they still don’t repent.
 - Dr. DA Carson (quoted in A Case for Christ by Lee Strobel)

Men are not in hell because God is angry with them. They are in wrath and darkness because they have done to the light, which infinitely flows forth from God, as that man does to the light who puts out his own eyes.
 - William Law

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." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.
 - C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

===== On Slavery =====

But you have to keep your eye on Jesus’ mission. Essentially, he did not come to overturn the Roman economic system, which included slavery. He came to free men and women from their sins. And here’s my point: what his message does is transform people so they begin to love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love their neighbor as themselves. Naturally, that has an impact on the idea of slavery. 

The overthrowing of slavery, then, is through the transformation of men and women by the gospel rather than through merely changing an economic system. We’ve all seen what can happen when you merely overthrow an economic system and impose a new order. The whole communist dream was to have a ‘revolutionary man’ followed by the ‘new man.’ Trouble is, they never found the ‘new man.’ They got rid of the oppressors of the peasants, but that didn’t mean the peasants were suddenly free—they were just under a new regime of darkness. In the final analysis, if you want lasting change, you’ve got to transform the hearts of human beings. And that was Jesus’ mission.
 - Dr. DA Carson (quoted in A Case for Christ by Lee Strobel)

===== On Pain =====

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
CS Lewis https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/c-s-lewis-on-the-problem-of-pain/

If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.
-C.S. Lewis

===== Not yet classified =====



https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/bonhoeffer-on-abortion



We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased'.
- C.S. Lewis: The Problem of Pain

... Christ is being tormented by the scribes, the Pharisees and the lawyers. So, nothing's really changed. The Pharisees are the hypocrites, the scribes are the academics, and the lawyers are still the lawyers.
- Jordan Petersen

"What is the way that leads to the love and awe of God? When someone contemplates His great and wondrous works and creatures, and from them obtains a glimpse of His wisdom which is incomparable and infinite, he will immediately love Him, praise Him, glorify Him, and long with an exceeding longing to know his great name, as David said, My soul thirsts for God, for the living God (Psalm 42:3). And when he ponders these matters, he will recoil affrighted and realise that he is a small creature, lowly and obscure, endowed with slight and slender intelligence, standing in the presence of Him who is perfect in knowledge. And so David said, When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers . . . what is man that you are mindful of him? (Psalm 8:4–5).8"
Maimonides

God grant me the serenity to accept the people that I can't change, the courage to change the one that I can, and the wisdom to know it's me.

In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; and in all things, charity.
-Old adage





It [Christianity] has the seemingly arbitrary and idiosyncratic character which modern science is slowly teaching us to put up with in this wilful universe, where energy is made up in little parcels of a quantity no one could predict, where speed is not unlimited, where irreversible entropy gives time a real direction and the cosmos, no longer static or cyclic, moves like a drama from a real beginning to a real end. If any message from the core of reality ever were to reach us, we should expect to find in it just that unexpectedness, that wilful, dramatic anfractuosity [def:sinuous or circuitous] which we find in the Christian faith. It has the master touch—the rough, male taste of reality, not made by us, or, indeed, for us, but hitting us in the face.
-C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Living with pain, daily grace: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/god-will-sustain-you-a-day-at-a-time

You can have no greater sign of confirmed pride than when you think you are humble enough.
-William Law

Strive in grace, not for grace.
- Ruth Chou Simmons



Coincidence, Jim, is just a word superstitious people use to describe complex events that in truth are the mathematically inevitable consequences of a primary cause.
 - Michael quoting Mr. Spock
Dean Koontz, Prodigal Son