What is transcendent needs no protection from science.
. . .

There is not a greater truth that is not also a simple truth. Remember that God confounds the wisest, that which is plain to the children. For all the complexity of man’s knowledge, he has most trouble with the simple things: Why am I? What is the world? How shall I live? The meaning of life escapes us all, and one suspects that those who know it best of all are the ones who never ask what it might be. These are not paradoxes, merely the real that is stranger than any fiction: what else could we expect from a God who is love? We will never understand something so simple, always misinterpreting the miracle: ask and it shall be given to you, knock and it shall be opened….
. . .

Most men dislike a teaching which lays upon them strict moral requirements that check their natural desires. Yet they like to be considered as Christians, and listen willingly to the hypocrites who preach that our righteousness is only that God holds us to be righteous, even if we are bad people, and that our righteousness is without us and not in us, for, according to such teaching, they can be counted as holy people. Woe to those who preach that men of sinful walk can not be considered pious; most are furious when they hear this, as we see and experience, and would like all such preachers to be driven away or even killed; but where that cannot be done, they strengthen their hypocrite preachers with praise, comfort, presents and protection, so that they may go on happily and give no place to the truth, however clear it may be.
              – Andreas Osiander
. . .

How can you wish all the wrongs done you to be redressed, while all the wrongs you do to be overlooked?
. . .

Institutions can never conserve without betraying the movements from which they proceed. The institution is static, whereas its parent movement has been dynamic; it confines men within its limits, while the movement had liberated them from the bondage of institutions; it looks to the past, [although] the movement had pointed forward. Though in content the institution resembles the dynamic epoch whence it proceeded, in spirit it is like the [state] before the revolution. So the Christian church, after the early period, often seemed more closely related in attitude to the Jewish synagogue and the Roman state than to the age of Christ and his apostles; its creed was often more like a system of philosophy than like the living gospel.
              – H. Richard Niebuhr
. . .

People don’t understand what it means that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior. Quite specifically, that we could never be admitted into Heaven because we are sinful. We all fall short of the glory. We may only enter because Christ can enter, and because of His reward: that he may invite as many tagalongs as He sees fit. That is what is meant by His being the only way to salvation. Life and death rests solely upon His saying, “I know him,” or “I know him not”: this is the Judgement. And no work we do in this life can earn this path, for all who live besides Him sin in some way, some how. Though faith without works is hollow, it is by faith alone that we are saved. This is the miracle. We are only His when we believe He is as He said He is — the Son of God — and receive the Holy Spirit, which He sent us after He came back from the dead, and then ascended to His right place on high. This is the narrow way, and wide is the way to destruction. Believe, and be saved.
. . .

Very few people in the world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy.
              – Gilbert Keith Chesterton
. . .

There was a light, but it faded. It was not faith.

There were visions, but they twisted. They were not faith.

There was a feeling, but it was illusory. It was not faith.

Faith was to hold on, when all those things went wrong.

Because I saw that light, had those visions, felt what I felt.

The narrow way is a journey, and rest may only be momentary.

It is a life that leads to life.
. . .

I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man I have ever met.
              – Dwight L. Moody
. . .

If you believe, then you must believe this: that whatever evil, it will inevitably play into the purpose of God. This, I think, is the most difficult point to reconcile. This, I think, is the reason for many who simply cannot reconcile it, who fall away from faith entirely. For it is a deep point of faith in the greatness of God, and in His wisdom: that no matter how horrible, how horrific, that He can make it right in the end. There are too many things in the world that test this hypothesis. There are too many things that can shake this heart of belief. The true believer must be able not to turn away from the worst of the evil in the world, and still in his soul believe that God is good. Supremely good. If making us believe that the Devil does not exist is Satan’s greatest trick, surely it is his secondmost to make of the world a playground of horrors. For anyone who feels, it makes faith need to explain itself. And God seems so silent on such things.
. . .

It would be the height of absurdity to label ignorance tempered by humility “faith;” for faith consists in the knowledge of God and Christ, not in reverence for the Church.
              – John Calvin
. . .

The devil will tempt us with trivialities, when the task at hand is to save a soul.
. . .

True religion invites us to become better people. False religion tells us that this has already occurred.
              – Abdal-Hakim Murad
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[more to come...]