"It is a very silly idea that in reading a book you must never 'skip.' All sensible people skip freely when they come to a chapter which they find is going to be no use to them" -- C.S. Lewis
"If your ministry does not occasionally lead to accusations of antinomianism, you are probably not preaching the gospel." -- Charles Spurgeon
"Although my memory's fading, I remember two things very clearly: I am a great sinner, and Christ is a great Savior." -- John Newton (Former slave trader who wrote Amazing Grace.)
"How will we, who have not been persecuted, stand up in heaven and look the martyrs in the eye if we have no scars to show?" -- Richard Wurmbrand (Romanian Christian ministar adn founder of the organization The Voice of the Martyrs.)
"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dereamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible."-- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book Three, Chapter 4, Good and Bad Habits"
The Official C. S. Lewis Group
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and un-just. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust?
A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too - for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist — in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless — I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality — namely my idea of justice — was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
-- CS Lewis, “Mere Christianity”, 25-26.
"your sin will take you father than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to spend"
-- Lester Roloff
We ought to give ourselves up to God with regard both to things temporal and spiritual and seek our satisfaction only in the fulfilling of His will. Whether God led us by suffering or by consolation all would be equal to a soul truly resigned.
-- Brother Lawrence, in the Practice of the Presence of God
Christ in the Scriptures
"We ought to read the Scriptures with the express design of finding Christ in them. Whoever shall turn aside from this object, though he may weary himself throughout his whole life in learning, will never attain the knowledge of the truth." — John Calvin
Why "Suffering" is Essential
Luther famously said that tentatio is the best teacher. He believed that you don't truly understand the promises of God—such as justification by faith—until you are in a position where those promises are all you have left.
"For as soon as God's Word takes root and grows in you, the devil will pester you, will make a real doctor of you, and will teach you by his temptations to seek and love God's Word." — Martin Luther
"You can't ride two horses with one ass Babydoll"
-- from Sweet Home Alabama, Earl admonishing Melanie
"The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus ['Man is a wolf to man.' Derived from Plautus, Asinaria II, iv, 88.]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? As a rule this cruel aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service of some other purpose, whose goal might also have been reached by milder measures. In circumstances that are favourable [112] to it, when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien. Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities committed during the racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane, or at the capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrors of the recent World War—anyone who calls these things to mind will have to bow humbly before the truth of this view. "-- Civilization and Its Discontents, Chapter V, by Sigmund Freud