Sermon quotes on christianity
Maltbie Davenport Babcock
The Christian life that is joyless is a discredit to God and a disgrace to itself.
Henry Ward Beecher
A Christianity which will not help those who are struggling from the bottom to the top of society, needs another Christ to die for it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.
G.K. Chesterton
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.
Craig Dykstra
The life of Christian faith is the practice of many practices
George Eliot
As soon as we lay ourselves entirely at His feet, we have enough light given to us to guide our own steps. We are like the foot soldiers, who hear nothing of the councils that determine the course of the great battle they are in, but hear plainly enough the word of command that they must themselves obey.
Michael Horton
American Christianity is a story of perpetual upheavals in churches and individual lives. Starting with the extraordinary conversion experience, our lives are motivated by a constant expectation for the Next Big Thing. We’re growing bored with the ordinary means of God’s grace, attending church week in and week out. Doctrines and disciplines that have shaped faithful Christian witness in the past are often marginalized or substituted with new fashions or methods. The new and improved may dazzle us for a moment, but soon they have become “so last year.”
C.S. Lewis
I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.
C.S. Lewis
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
Thomas B. Macaulay
The whole history of Christianity proves that she has little indeed to fear from persecution as a foe, but much to fear from persecution as an ally.
Jacques Maritain
Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.
Blaise Pascal
The Christian religion, then, teaches men these two truths; that there is a one whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him.
Jaroslav Pelikan
If Christ is risen, nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen—nothing else matters.
Philip Yancey
No one ever converted to Christianity because they lost the argument.
Elton Trueblood
Occasionally we talk about our Christianity as something that solves problems, and there is a sense in which it does. Long before it does so, however, it increases both the number and the intensity of the problems. Even our intellectual questions are increased by the acceptance of a strong religious faith…if a man wishes to avoid the disturbing effect of paradoxes, the best advice is for him to leave the Christian faith alone.
H. Richard Niebuhr
The great Christian revolutions come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when someone takes radically something that was always there.
Alan Kreider
Why did this minor mystery religion from the eastern Mediterranean—marginal, despised, discriminated against—grow substantially, eventually supplanting the well-endowed, respectable cults that were supported by the empire and aristocracy?
E. Stanley Jones
The Indian is making an amazing discovery, namely that Christianity and Jesus are not the same – that they may have Jesus without the system that has been built up around Him in the West.
Stanley Hauerwas
I fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need our protection. What God demands is not protection, but truth.
Emmanuel Katongole & Chris Rice
The problem with individualistic Christianity is what we call “reconciliation without memory,” an approach that ignores the wounds of the world and proclaims peace where there is no peace (see Jer 8:11).
Taken from Reconciling All Things by Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice. ©2008 by Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove IL 60515-1426. www.ivpress.com
Mike Yaconelli
Spirituality is not a formula; it is not a test. It is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection. The way of the spiritual life begins where we are now in the mess of our lives. Accepting the reality of our broken, flawed lives is the beginning of spirituality, not because the spiritual life will remove our flaws, but because we let go of seeking perfection and instead seek God, the one who is present in the tangledness of our lives. Spirituality is not about being fixed; it is about God’s being present in the mess of our unfixedness.
Messy Spirituality (Zondervan, 2002), p. 13.
Henry Morris
The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the crowning proof of Christianity. If the resurrection did not take place, then Christianity is a false religion. If it did take place, then Christ is God and the Christian faith is absolute truth.
Augustine of Hippo
If you ask me what is the first precept of the Christian religion, I will answer first, second and third, Humility.
C.S. Lewis
I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.
Ronald Rolheiser
Christianity is without doubt the earthiest of all religions. Unlike most other religions, it doesn’t call you out of the physical, out of the body, or out of the world. Rather it tells you that God enters the physical, becomes one with it, blesses it, redeems it, and that there is no reason to escape from it.
Our One Great Act of Fidelity, The Crown Publishing Group, 2011, p. 25.
PBS Special: The Christians
Christianity is the only major religion to have as its central focus the suffering and degradation of its God. The crucifixion is so familiar to us, and so moving, that it is hard to realize how unusual it is as an image of God”
1981
Sheldon Van Auken
The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness.
Dana Robert
The typical late twentieth-century Christian was no longer a European man but a Latin American or African woman.
“Shifting Southward: Global Christianity Since 1945,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 24 (April 2000): 50.
G.K. Chesterton
Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete.
Orthodoxy
Peter Wehner
The greatest and most powerful Christian distinctive is not the exercise of power; it is the offer of grace
“Christians as a Cultural Minority (Again).” Washington Institute, January 14, 2021.
G.K. Chesterton
[The chief aim of Christianity] was to give room for good things to run wild.
Orthodoxy
Ben Myers
Yes, religion is a crutch. But it’s not my own personal crutch. It is Adam’s crutch. It’s the human race that walks (if it walks at all) with a limp. And so when Sunday morning comes around I drag old Adam out of bed. I make him get dressed and put shoes on his feet. I brush his teeth. I lead him out the door. I force him to go to church. It’s a thankless task, but somebody’s got to do it. I expect that if I keep dragging Adam along to church every Sunday, he might eventually become a Christian. And if he becomes a Christian—who knows?—perhaps in time he will even become that rarest and best of things: a genuine, proper, fully functioning and bona fide human being.
“Why Go to Church?” Faith and Theology (blog), October 20, 2013.
Dorothy Sayers
Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as a bad press. We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine—dull dogma as people call it. The fact is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama.
Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
To those who only know it outwardly, Christianity seems desperately intricate. In reality, taken in its main lines, it contains an extremely simple and astonishingly bold solution of the world.
In the centre, so glaring as to be disconcerting, intelligence. It will be easy for me, after all I have said, to demonstrate the value and actuality of this tenacious personalism, not long since condemned as obsolete. The important thing to point out here is the way in which such an attitude in the hearts of the faithful leaves the door open to, and is easily allied to, everything that is great and healthy in the universal.
P.T. Forsyth
Christianity is not the sacrifice we make, but the sacrifice we trust.
Charles Ryrie
Christianity is distinct from all other religions because it is a message of grace. Jesus Christ is the supreme revelation of God’s grace. Salvation is by grace, and grace governs and empowers Christian living. Without grace, Christianity is nothing.
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