Quotes from Eric Metaxas

To postulate a trillion-trillion other universes, rather than one God, in order to explain the orderliness of our universe, seems the height of irrationality.

God wants to see human beings, not ghosts who shun the world. In the whole of world history there is only one real significant hour ... the present ... if you want to find eternity, you must serve the times.

Indeed, not just the problems but the loud cry "Reform!" had been heard here and there for centuries before Luther.

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

Stifter once said, "Pain is a holy angel, who shows treasures to men which otherwise remain forever hidden; through him men have become greater than through all joys of the world.

At the center were numerous hospital and care facilities, including orphanages. Bonhoeffer had never seen anything like it. It was the antithesis of the Nietzschean worldview that exalted power and strength. It was the gospel made visible, a fairy-tale landscape of grace, where the weak and helpless were cared for in a palpably Christian atmosphere.

England had decidedly turned its back on any expressions of what we might call serious Christian belief. Having led to so much division and violence, religion was now in full-scale retreat. The churches of mid-eighteenth-century England all but abandoned orthodox, historical Christianity and now preached a tepid kind of moralism that seemed to present civility and the preservation of the status quo as the summum bonnum.

Great men like Wilberforce and Wesley had the humility and the wisdom to know that whatever strengths they had—and they had many—they could not win without a total reliance on God. At its core, every battle worth fighting is a spiritual battle. Those men were able to succeed only because they humbled themselves and entrusted the battle to God.

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

One knows what is right, but holds it at arm's length for a time, neither throwing it out, nor embracing it.

It's only logical that if God always answered our prayers as we wanted him to, those answers to our prayers could hardly be considered miraculous. They would only be part of a predictable system that we could manipulate, if only we knew how. It really makes God not God, but a "God" or a god whom we are ultimately able to control through our efforts, whether via prayer or via our "moral" actions designed to elicit a favorable response.

Indeed, when Luther's school-yard chum Hans Reinecke wrote to him of his father's death, Luther wrote, "Seldom if ever have I despised death as much as I do now." He said that it "has plunged me into deep sadness not only because he was my father but also because he loved me very much." Even more, he says, "through him my creator has given me all that I am and have.