A man who had abandoned his childhood christian faith when he was 13, only to find it again 20 years later. He is a beloved author and respected intellectual. I truly appreciate what he has contributed to literature, as a whole, and more importantly his profundity, in dissecting and operationalizing the ins and outs of what it means for him to be a follower of Jesus. He didn't grow up following traditions or set standards. He wrestled and thought through about what it means to be a Christian for the sake of following Jesus. The following is a collection of quotes that I feel reflect that:
"The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us."
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"I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity."
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"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 the 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 patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
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"I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God- it changes me."
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"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
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"Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
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"It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."
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"To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you."
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"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. "
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"It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence."
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"I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?"
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