Quotes from Eric Metaxas

The Gospel of Christ was the most powerful sociological leveler in history.

By the time Whitefield died in 1770, an inconceivable 80 percent of the population of the American colonies had heard him preach at least once.

This is the very thing that has driven people to suicide through the centuries. It is hopelessness made real, or to use Milton's famous phrase, it is "darkness visible," a description that the author William Styron used as a title for his own poignant memoir on depression.

Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God's commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross.

Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.

Whitefield came to a realization that would have far-reaching effects. He saw that the Bible didn't teach that we must work harder at becoming perfect and holy, but that we must instead throw ourselves on God's mercy. Moral perfection wasn't the answer: Jesus was the answer. Jesus had been morally perfect and we weren't supposed to save ourselves—we were supposed to ask him to save us.

Real faith is never something that can be forced by the state. It's something that either be encouraged and smiled upon or discouraged and frowned-upon.

In 1933, one student said, "Among the public, there spread the expectation that the salvation of the German people would now come from Hitler. But in the lectures we were told that salvation comes only from Jesus Christ.

If you take God and faith and morality out of the equation, everything inevitably falls apart.

As television has had a homogenizing effect on the accents and dialects of Americans, watering down accents and sanding down sharp twangs, Luther's Bible created a single German tongue. Suddenly millers from München could communicate with bakers from Bremen. Out of this grew a sense of a common heritage and facilitating communication among diverse regions.

A seed had been pressed into the soil of his soul, and had been watered, and would soon burst and sprout green and grow beyond all possibility of concealing.

Strange that the most generous men and religious, do not see that their duties increase with their fortune, and that they will be punished for spending it" on themselves in eating and drinking.