Shane Claiborne

“I think I’ve lost hope in the church,” I confessed, brokenhearted, to a friend. I will never forget her response. “No. You haven’t lost hope in the church. You may have lost hope in Christianity or Christendom or all the institutions, but you have not lost hope in the church. This is the church.” At that moment, we decided to stop complaining about the church we saw, and we set our hearts on becoming the church we dreamed of (Shane Claiborne, the Irresistible Revolution, p. 64).

Joni Eareckson Tada

Question to Joni Eareckson Tada: “How do you keep leading and serving and creating, despite your obvious physical challenges?”

This is the only time in history when I get to fight for God. This is the only part of my eternal story when I am actually in the battle. Once I die, I’ll be in celebration mode in a glorified body in a whole different set of circumstances. But this is my limited window of opportunity, and I’m going to fight the good fight for all I’m worth (Joni Eareckson Tada).

C.S. Lewis

I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here [sexual morality]. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.95).

C.S. Lewis

Of course, I quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth–only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. p. 39).

C.S. Lewis

One man said to me, “Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?” But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbors or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. p. 26).

St. Francis of Assisi

Thou wishest to know why it is I whom men follow? It is because the eyes of the Most High have willed it thus: He continually watches the good and the wicked, and as his most holy eyes have not found among sinners any smaller man, nor any more insufficient and more sinful… Therefore he has chosen me to accomplish the marvelous work which God has undertaken; he chose me because he could find no one more worthless, and he wished here to confound the nobility and grandeur, the strength, the beauty, and the learning of this world (St. Francis of Assisi).

Marcus Mumford

For every kiss your beauty trumped my doubt (Mumford & Sons, Winter Winds)

G.K. Chesterton

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes…. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water, and yet drink death like wine (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 91-92).

G.K. Chesterton

Christianity has not so much been tried and found wanting, as it has been found difficult and left untried. (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy).

Edmund Clowney

Again, it is by meditation and prayer that we experience the relationship of possessive love with God. Without reflection on our sin and unworthiness the joy of that love could be destoryed by unthinking presumption. On the other hand, to claim the glory of our sonship we must, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, reflect on who we are and where we stand by Christ’s grace – or better, on who our Lord is and where he stands with us and for us (Edmund Clowney, Christian Meditation, p. 73-74).