Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.
An alternate explanation is not a refutation.
We want to be on the offensive without being offensive.
Our value is built into us, and nothing and no one can take it away.
God created man to share friendship with Him and share in His happiness.
Whenever someone tries to deny the truth, ultimately, reality betrays him.
If the unborn is a human person, no justification for abortion is adequate.
Wisdom is an artful method—a skillful, tactical, fair, and diplomatic use of knowledge.
God existed before He made anything else, and He Himself was never made. God is eternal.
Every religion, every philosophy, every individual outlook on life tells a story of reality.
Almost everyone agrees the world is not the way it ought to be. It's called the problem of evil.
A worldview is simply someone's relatively organized understanding of what the world is actually like.
Our souls - our invisible selves - bear the mark of God Himself. We're like God in that we bear His image.
Evil did not catch God by surprise. He had a rescue plan, and He's still in the process of working out His plan.
I want people to see that Christianity claims to be true in the deep sense, and if it isn't, then it solves nothing at all.
Man had freedom to choose the good, but this same freedom also allowed him to choose the bad. This is called moral freedom.
I'm hoping that The Story of Reality will fill in more details for the Christian believer and will create a crisis of faith for the nonbeliever.
Nowadays, people have a habit of relativizing religion, reducing it to "your truth" versus "my truth" versus "their truth," and that's the end of it.
Human beings are special. We're creatures (we're not little gods), but we're also more than creatures. In fact, we're the most wonderful creatures in the world next to God.
Reality has a way of injuring people who don't take it seriously. If you don't believe in gravity, for example, and then step off a tall building, you won't just float away.
You may be a fantastic person, and you may have some wonderful religious views that might even turn out to be true, but the religion you'd be following would not be Christianity.
Everyone has a belief system in his or her mind, a story about the way they think the world actually is, even if they haven't thought about it much or worked out all the details.
Sometimes (at least in principle) God might allow some evil because doing so will prevent a greater evil, and sometimes He might allow evil because it will produce a greater good.
If man is not special, if he's not deeply different from any other thing, then there's no good reason not to treat him just like any other thing when it's convenient for us to do so.
Trouble, hardship, difficulty, pain, suffering, conflict, tragedy, evil - they're all part of the [Christian] Story. Indeed, the problem of evil is the reason there's any Story at all.
Something good made something bad possible (though not inevitable). Humans, however, didn't use their freedom well. Instead of using it to honor God in friendship, they used it to rebel.
In the Christian Story, mind and matter - invisible things and visible things - are both real. The Christian view is not the only way of viewing the world, of course. It has competition.
God is the very first piece of the Christian Story because the Story is all about Him. He is the central character, not us. The Story is not so much about God's plan for our lives as it is about our lives for God's plan.
In the Story of Reality man does not rescue himself for his own glory. Instead, God rescues man for His glory. Every other story describes what man needs to do to fix himself and save him from whatever else is wrong with the world.
If the Story is not accurate to reality, it's not any kind of truth at all. So it can never be 'my truth' or 'your truth,' even though we may believe it. It can only be our delusion or our mistake or our error, but it can never be our 'truth.'
When God's children disobeyed their heavenly Father, they damaged everything. When Adam and Eve rebelled against the King of the universe, they broke the whole world. This is why there is evil and suffering. Bad things happen in a world that's broken.
In the Story of Reality a man is a helpless slave - enslaved to his own passions, the flesh, and enslaved to a cruel master, the devil - a slave who God Himself rescues and adopts into His own family. It is the very worst news coupled with the very best news.
When we encounter new details of our world we fill in more of the spaces. When we discover details that don't seem to fit with our view of the world, we have a kind of "crisis of faith," even if our worldview is not especially religious. We're forced to redraw our "map" a bit.
Some people suggest that a worldview is like a set of glasses that color the way you see the world around you. A Christian interprets the world one way, and an atheist interprets the same world a completely different way since he's looking through different worldview "glasses."
If the Christian doesn't get reality right, he loses effectiveness in this life. If the non-Christian doesn't get reality right, he loses much in this life, and everything and the next one. As Jesus put it, "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?"
Our innate, built-in human value is the reason we have binding duties or obligations towards each other that we don't have towards any other kind of thing. It's also the reason we have unalienable human rights. If man's God-given, special value falls, then unalienable human rights fall, too.
So let's set the record straight. Faith is not the opposite of reason. The opposite of faith is unbelief. And reason is not the opposite of faith. The opposite of reason is irrationality. Do some Christians have irrational faith? Sure. Do some skeptics have unreasonable unbelief? You bet. It works both ways.
There is no neutral ground when it comes to the tolerance question. Everybody has a point of view she thinks is right, and everybody passes judgment at some point or another. The Christian gets pigeonholed as the judgmental one, but everyone else is judging, too, even people who consider themselves relativists.
If Darwinism is true, then there is no purpose or meaning to life, there is no morality, there's no qualitative difference between humans and animals, there's no life after death, and there's no purpose to human history. Now, are you trying to tell me that it doesn't really matter if people believe we evolved or not?
Why so many mentions regarding Jesus from such a wide variety of sources (Pliny, Tacitus, Lucian, Josephus, to name a few)? Because Jesus of Nazareth was a man of history, who made a profound impact on history. There's no good reason to doubt that Jesus existed, or to think the real Jesus was completely different from the one depicted in the Story.
Always make it a goal to keep your conversations cordial. Sometimes that will not be possible. If a principled, charitable expression of your ideas makes someone mad, there’s little you can do about it. Jesus’ teaching made some people furious. Just make sure it’s your ideas that offend and not you, that your beliefs cause the dispute and not your behavior.
The word "Christian" means something in particular. The basic outline and general truths and doctrines central to Christianity have been hammered out over 2000 years of reflection on the teachings of Jesus and his apostles. If you disagree with these foundational concerns - the kinds of things I focus on in The Story of Reality - then you're simply not a Christian.
People are tempted to think (understandably) that if God were really good He'd never allow any evil in the world at all. But I don't think a perfectly good God would never permit any evil, and neither would others, I wager, if they thought about it. Rather, I think that a good God always prevents suffering and evil unless He has a good reason to allow it. That's the crux.
Christianity is actually "true Truth," as Francis Schaeffer used to put it. God really does exist, Heaven actually is real (along with Hell), Jesus really did live and He did the things the historical records - the Gospels - say He did, the resurrection of Christ really happened, and there really is hope each of us can count on for "the kind of perfect world our hearts have always longed for."
Every worldview has its ambiguities - debatable elements that people simply will not see to eye on. There's nothing wrong with that as long as the disagreement is principled and dignified. I actually think that arguments - as opposed to quarrels - are good things because they're the best way to figure out what's true. Share your reasons, listen carefully to each other, be nice, and may the best idea win.
Our reasons for believing Jesus existed and also that He was who He claimed to be - the God who came down - are the same reasons for believing any fact of history: the documentation is substantial and it passes all the tests of historical reliability. Scholars - both liberal and conservative - overwhelming agree that Jesus of Nazareth was a man of history and the Gospels, on the main, tell His story accurately.
Most Christians who've been around for a while have their Story in bits and pieces, but have never seen how powerful it really is when assembled as a whole. I want them to see how well it fits together and how it offers tremendous explanatory power regarding the world as we actually find it. I want them to see how it resolves the problem of evil, and why God's solution - the God/man Jesus - is the only solution.
Some say Christianity is just a crutch. But let's turn the question on its edge for a moment. Is atheism an emotional crutch, wishful thinking? The ax cuts both ways. Perhaps atheists are rejecting God because they've had a bad relationship with their father. Instead of inventing God, have atheists invented non-God? Have they invented atheism to escape some of the frightening implications of God's existence? Think about it.
Though it's hard to be completely certain about things like this, I have a suspicion that only someone with deep freedom (one who makes decisions for reasons that are his own) and who's also a moral being (can experience goodness) can have a meaningful friendship with God. If friendship with God and sharing in His happiness are good things (and it seems they are), then making a creature who could enjoy these things is also a good thing, even if it comes with a liability. There's a risk.
Worldviews have four elements that help us understand how a person's story fits together: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. "Creation" tells us how things began, where everything came from (including us), the reason for our origins, and what ultimate reality is like. "Fall" describes the problem (since we all know something has gone wrong with the world). "Redemption" gives us the solution, the way to fix what went wrong. "Restoration" describes what the world would look like once the repair begins to take place.