The essential amorality of all atheist doctrines is often hidden from us by an irrelevant personal argument. We see that many articulate secularists are well-meaning and law-abiding men; we see them go into righteous indignation over injustice and often devote their lives to good works. So we conclude that “he can’t be wrong whose life is in the right”–that their philosophies are just as good guides to action as Christianity. What we don’t see is that they are not acting on their philosophies. They are acting, out of habit or sentiment, on an inherited Christian ethic which they still take for granted though they have rejected the creed from which it sprang. Their children will inherit some what less of it.

…Joy Davidman (1915-1960), Smoke on the Mountain [1955]

Commemoration of Brigid, Abbess of Kildare, c.525

There is a cowardice in this age which is not Christian. We shrink from the consequences of truth. We look round and cling dependently. We ask what men will think; what others will say; whether they will not stare in astonishment. Perhaps they will; but he who is calculating that, will accomplish nothing in this
life. The Father — the Father which is with us and in us — what does He think? God’s work cannot be done without a spirit of independence. A man has got some way in the Christian life when he has learned to say, humbly yet majestically, “I dare to be alone.”

… F. W. Robertson

The Bible tells us very clearly that to “know” God is not an affair of the mind only, but an act in which our whole being — heart, mind, and will — is vitally engaged; so that sheer intellectual speculation would enable us to form certain ideas about God but never to know Him. To be grasped, God’s will must be met with a readiness to obey.

…Suzanne de Diétrich (1891-1981), Discovering the Bible
Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey —
whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted.

…Romans 6:16,17 (NIV),Commemoration of Mellitus, First Bishop of London, 624

‘Twas an unhappy Division that has been made between Faith and Works; though in my Intellect I may divide them, just as in the Candle I know there is both Light and Heat. But yet, put out the Candle, and they are both gone.

…John Selden (1584-1654)

I’m Israle and i’m a student going to st jhon coummity collage. I took pre algebra 5 years ago as a freashman in high school. This is my frist year of collage. I have a high school diopoma but these people put me into these prep classes. Per algebra is pretty easy but i do need help sometime. Commutative property of addition, additive identity, additive inverse, distributive property, associative multiplilation, multiplicative identity and closure. I may past the test before you can give this back to me. I mean i past the self test with 100% but the post test i get a 60%. I want to know what going on. If i need more help in math i’ll come back to you.

What makes life worth living is the mutual enrichment of people through understanding, intelligence and affection. It is just here that our awareness that Jesus is our contemporary and that Calvary is relevant to our present human situation ought to help us greatly. And that is not merely because in his relationships with others during his earthly life in Palestine Jesus exemplified all that I have tried to say about human relationships. In every genuine human encounter with another person we may become aware of Jesus, and meet with him. This may sound fanciful, but there is much in the Scriptures and in Christian experience which suggests that Jesus is frequently met in the traffic of person with person, provided that there is a genuine encounter between them. Jesus himself showed that for this to happen demands courage and a willingness to move from a life that is centered in itself. So if we are to pass out of that lonely world of isolation then we must be prepared to take the risks that are always involved when we allow persons to confront us as persons and do not regard them as things. Yet, dangerous though it may be to live in this way, it is the only way to live.

…Ambrose Reeves (1899-1980), Calvary Now [1965]

We were called to be witnesses, not lawyers or judges

You can tell how big a person is by what it takes to discourage him.

It is in vain, O men, that you seek within yourselves the cure for your miseries. All your insight only leads you to the knowledge that it is not in yourselves that you will discover the true and the good. The philosophers promised them to you, and have not been able to keep their promises… Your principal maladies are pride, which cuts you off from God, and sensuality, which binds you to the earth; and they have done nothing but foster at least one of these maladies. If they have given you God for your object, it has only been to pander to your pride; they have made you think that you were like Him and resembled Him by your nature. And those who have grasped the vanity of such a pretension have cast you down into the other abyss by making you believe that your nature was like that of the beasts of the field, and have led you to seek your good in lust, which is the lot of animals.

…Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

February 7, 2004

One of Paul’s most important teachings… is the doctrine of what we call “justification by faith”. It frequently appears to the non-Christian mind that this is an immoral or at least unmoral doctrine. Paul appears to be saying that a man is justified before God, not by his goodness or badness, not by his good deeds or bad deeds, but by believing in a certain doctrine of Atonement. Of course, when we come to examine the matter more closely, we can see that there is nothing unmoral in this teaching at all. For if “faith” means using a God-given faculty to apprehend the unseen divine order, and means, moreover, involving oneself in that order by personal commitment, we can at once see how different that is from merely accepting a certain view of Christian redemption… That which man in every religion, every century, every country, was powerless to affect, God has achieved by the devastating humility of His action and suffering in Jesus Christ. Now, accepting such an action as a fait accompli is only possible by this perceptive faculty of “faith”. It requires not merely intellectual assent but a shifting of personal trust from the achievements of the self to the completely undeserved action of God. To accept this teaching by mind and heart does, indeed, require a metanoia [“transformation”], a revolution in the outlook of both heart and mind.

… J. B. Phillips (1906-1982),

New Testament Christianity [1956]