You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Faith' category.
“After death what?”
Lloyd-Jones to a young man, to E. T. Rees, Church Secretary for the Bethlehem Forward Movement, and ten years his senior; Iain H. Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years, 1899-1939 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2002), 116.
“There was too much evidence. Had the evidence been weak, they would have scoffed and left him alone. They might have even been willing to let Jesus live to an old age. It was only because the evidence was so strong that Jesus was such a treat to them. They decided to kill both Jesus and the evidence [Lazarus]. Then they would not have to endure the existence of Lazarus, alive, as a challenge to their own authority. What they saw in Jesus was not a revealer of God but only a threat to their power and security.”
Dick Keyes, Seeing Through Cynicism: A Reconsideration of the Power of Suspicion (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2006), 143.
“For Christian righteousness consisteth in two things; that is to say, in faith of the heart, and in God’s imputation.”
Martin Luther, A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, in John Dillenberger, ed., Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings (New York: Anchor, 1962), 127.
“What I needed was flying. . . . I needed to fly so much that my subconscious mind would become so reconditioned to the air that it would accept it as its natural element.”
Suffering the loss of a loved one, suffering from an inability to sleep, pilot Gordon Taylor believes that flying, his only joy, will become his only life; Gordon Taylor, The Sky Beyond (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 91.
“We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither. We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all out knowledge. Let us be silent, content in our little corner, meek and gentle like them. That is the wisdom of life.”
A somber Dirk Stroeve, after his wife leaves him and commits suicide. W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (New York: Penguin, 1944), 129-30.
“I shall not dispute the priority, whether faith or repentance goes first. Doubtless repentance shows itself first in a Christian’s life. Yet I am apt to think that the seeds of faith are first wrought in the heart. As when a burning taper is brought into a room the light shows itself first, but the taper was before the light, so we see the fruits of repentance first, but the beginnings of faith were there before.
That which inclines me to think that faith is seminally in the heart before repentance is because repentance, being a grace, must be exercised by one that is living. Now, how does the soul live but by faith? ‘The just shall live by faith (Heb. 10.38)’”
Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994, first published in 1668), 12.
“Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 977; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 18 October, 1931.
“My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ ’saved’ or ‘opened salvation to’ the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary: one could see from ordinary experience how sin (e.g. the case of a drunkard) could get a man to such a point that he was bound to reach Hell (i.e. complete degradation and misery) in this life unless something quite beyond mere natural help or effort stepped in. And I could well imagine a whole world being in the same state and similarly in need of miracle. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now – except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (‘propitiation’ – ’sacrifice’ – ‘the blood of the Lamb’) – expressions which I could only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 976; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 18 October, 1931.
“He [brother, Warnie] and I even went together to Church twice: and – will you believe it – he said to me in conversation that he was beginning to think the religious view of things was after all true. MInd you (like me, at first) he didn’t want it to be, nor like it: but his intellect is beginning to revolt from the semi-scientific assumptions we all grew up in, and the other explanation of the world seems to him daily more probable.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 948; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 10 January, 1931.
“I think the trouble with me is lack of faith. I have no rational ground for going back on the arguments that convinced me of God’s existence: but the irrational deadweight of my old sceptical habits, and the spirit of this age, and the cares of the day, steal away all my lively feeling of the truth, and often when I pray I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existent address. Mind you I don’t think so – the whole of my reasonable mind is convinced: but I often feel so. However, there is nothing to do but to peg away. One falls so often that it hardly seems worth while picking oneself up and going through the farce of starting over again as if you could ever hope to walk. Still, this seeming absurdity is the only sensible thing I do, so I must continue it. And all the time, on the other side, the imaginative side, (the fairy angel) I get such glimpses and vanishing memories as often take my breath away: as if they said ‘Look what you’re losing’ – as if they were there just to deprive one of all excuse.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 944-45; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 24 December, 1930.
