Francis schaeffer quotes

Preaching the gospel without the Holy Spirit is to miss the entire point of the command of Jesus Christ for our era. In the area of "Christian activities" or "Christian service," how we are doing it is at least as important as what we are doing.

In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.

Modern multiple divorce is rooted in the fact that many are seeking in human relationships what human relationships can never give. Why do they have multiple divorce, instead of merely promiscuous affairs? Because they are seeking more than merely sexual relationship.

Eternity will be wonderful, but there is one thing heaven will not contain, and that is the call, the possibility, and the privilege of living a supernatural life here and now by faith, before we meet Jesus face to face.

The difference between Christian thinking and the non-Christian philosopher has always been at this point. The non-Christian philosopher has always said that man is normal now, but biblical Christianity says he is abnormal now.

We cannot deal with people like human beings, we cannot deal with them on the high level of true humanity, unless we really know their origin-who they are. God tells man who he is. God tells us that He created man in His image. So man is something wonderful.

In two areas above all others the Christian demonstration of love and communication stands clear: in the area of the Christian couple and their children; and in the personal relationships of Christians in the church. If there is no demonstration in these two places, on the personal level, the world can conclude that orthodox Christian doctrine is nothing but dead, cold words.

You must not lose confidence in God because you lost confidence in your pastor. If our confidence in God had to depend upon our confidence in any human person, we would be on shifting sand.

Some psychological and sociological conditioning occurs in every man's life and this affects the decisions he makes. But we must resist the modern concept that all sin can be explained merely on the basis of conditioning.

Art is a reflection of God's creativity, an evidence that we are made in the image of God.

Hudson Taylor said, "The Lord's work done in the Lord's way will never fail to have the Lord's provision." ...The Lord's work done in human energy is not the Lord's work any longer. It is something, but it is not the Lord's work.

The beginning of men's rebellion against God was, and is, the lack of a thankful heart.

I have come to the conclusion that none of us in our generation feels as guilty about sin as we should or as our forefathers did.

It is not enough for the Church to be engaged with the State in healing social ills, though this is important at times. But when the world can turn around and see a group of God's people exhibiting substantial healing in the area of human relationships in their present life, then the world will take notice. Each group of Christians is, as it were, a pilot plant, showing that something can be done in the present situation, if only we begin in the right way.

Modern man has not only thrown away Christian theology, he has thrown away the possibility of what our forefathers had as a basis for morality and law.

It is only as we consciously bring each victory to His feet, and keep it there as we think of it - and especially as we speak of it - that we can avoid the pride of that victory, which can be worse than the sin over which we claim to have had the victory.

The church's or Christian group's methods are as important as its message.

But the dignity of human life is unbreakably linked to the existence of the personal-infinite God. It is because there is a personal-infinite God who has made men and women in His own image that they have a unique dignity of life as human beings. Human life then is filled with dignity, and the state and humanistically oriented law have no right and no authority to take human life arbitrarily in the way it is being taken.

When a man comes under the blood of Christ, his whole capacity as a man is refashioned. His soul is saved, yes, but so are his mind and his body. True spirituality means the lordship of Christ over the total man.

Truth carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation, but confrontation nevertheless.

Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles.

Sadly enough, there is a kind of an anti-intellectualism among many Christians: spirituality is falsely pitted against intellectual comprehension as though they stood in a dichotomy. Such anti-intellectualism cuts away at the very heart of the Christian message. Of course, there is a false intellectualism which does destroy the work of the Holy Spirit. But it does not arise when men wrestle honestly with honest questions and then see that the Bible has the answers. This does not oppose true spirituality.

The one thing the media abhors almost without exception is anyone who takes a firm stand on any issue out of religious principle, unless their stand happens to coincide with their expressed views.

Isolating the student from large sections of human knowledge is not the basis of a Christian education. Rather it is giving him or her the framework for total truth, rooted in the Creator's existence and in the Bible's teaching, so that in each step of the formal learning process the student will understand what is true and what is false and why it is true or false.

With the Fall all became abnormal. It is not just that the individual is separated from God by his true moral guilt, but each of us is not what God made us to be. Beyond each of us as individuals, human relationships are not what God meant them to be. And beyond that, nature is abnormal - the whole cause-and-effect significant history is now abnormal. To say it another way: there is much in history now which should not be.

There is a sad myth going around today - the myth of neutrality. According to this myth, the secular world gives every point of view an equal chance to be heard. And it works fairly well - unless you are a Christian.

Belief does not change what is.

God's Word will never pass away, but looking back to the Old Testament and since the time of Christ, with tears we must say that because of lack of fortitude and faithfulness on the part of God's people, God's Word has many times been allowed to be bent, to conform to the surrounding, passing, changing culture of that moment rather than to stand as the inerrant Word of God judging the form of the world spirit and the surrounding culture of that moment. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, may our children and grandchildren not say that such can be said about us.

The great distinction of a true Christian is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. How careful should he be, lest anything in his thoughts or feelings would be offensive to the Divine Guest.!

I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.

To die is to be with the Lord. It is not just an idea, it is a reality.

Today the separation of church and state in America is used to silence the church. When Christians speak out on issues, the hue and cry from the humanist state and media is that Christians, an all religions, are prohibited from speaking since there is a separation of church and state.

Each generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.

A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. An art work can be a doxology in itself.

Man, made in the image of God, has a purpose - to be in relationship to God, who is there. Man forgets his purpose and thus he forgets who he is and what life means.

When my conscience under the Holy Spirit makes me aware of a specific sin I should at once call that sin sin and bring it consciously under the blood of Christ.

Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles. But people with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of what world-view is true.

I hesitate to add, but I will, that this is fun. God means Christianity to be fun. There is to be a reality of love and communication in the Christian-to-Christian relationship, individually and corporately, which is completely and truly personal.

But the fact that Christ as the bridegroom brings forth fruit through me as the bride, through the agency of the indwelling Holy Spirit by faith, opens the way for me as a Christian to begin to know in the present life the reality of the supernatural. This is where the Christian is to live. Doctrine is important, but it is not an end in itself. There is to be an experiential reality, moment by moment.

In fact, philosophy is universal in scope. No man can live without a world view; therefore, there is no man who is not a philosopher.

He who loses the arts loses the culture.

...that is our calling: to show that there is a reality in personal relationship, and not just words about it.

The ordinary Christian with the Bible in his hand can say that the majority is wrong.

Jesus taught that the mark of the Christian is the observable love shown among all true believers.

We must realize that the Reformation world view leads in the direction of government freedom. But the humanist world view with inevitable certainty leads in the direction of statism. This is so because humanists, having no god, must put something at the center, and it is inevitably society, government, or the state.

Certainly every Christian ought to be praying and working to nullify the abominable abortion law. But as we work and pray, we should have in mind not only this important issue as though it stood alone. Rather, we should be struggling and praying that this whole other total entity "(this godless) worldview" can be rolled back with all its results across all of life.

When my conscience under the Holy Spirit makes me aware of a specific sin I should at once call that sin sin and bring it consciously under the blood of Christ. Now it is covered and it is not honoring to the finished work of Jesus Christ to worry about it, as far as my relationship to God is concerned. Indeed, to worry about it is to do spite to the infinite value of the death of the Son of God. My fellowship with God is restored.

This is not an age in which to be a soft Christian.

If one starts with an impersonal beginning, the answer to morals eventually turns out to be the assertion that there are no morals.

If I'm going to be in the right relationship with God, I should treat the things he has made in the same way he treats them.

This equation of the impersonal plus time plus chance producing the total configuration of the universe and all that is in it, modern people hold by faith.

Reformation is a return to the sound doctrine of the Bible. Revival is the practice of that sound doctrine under the power of the Holy Spirit.

One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary.

If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values. If there is no absolute beyond man's ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.

There is no use of Evangelicalism seeming to get larger and larger, if at the same time appreciable parts of Evangelicalism are getting soft at that which is the central core, namely the Scriptures.

If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity. There is no good reason why mankind should be perceived as special. Human life is cheapened. We can see this in many of the major issues being debated in our society today.

If man has been kicked up out of that which is only impersonal by chance , then those things that make him man-hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication-are ultimately unfulfillable and thus meaningless.

No totalitarian authority nor authoritarian state can tolerate those who have an absolute by which to judge that state and its actions. The Christians had that absolute in God's revelation.

The Lord is the General, and he has the right . . . the sovereign right . . . to put us where he wants in the battle.

Truth demands confrontation. It must be loving confrontation, but there must be confrontation nonetheless.

In God's world the individual counts. Therefore, Christian art should deal with the individual.

As Christians, we must see that just because an artist-even a great artist-portrays a worldview in writing or on canvas, it does not mean that we should automatically accept that worldview. Good art heightens the impact of that worldview, but it does not make it true.

People drift from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes thinkable as the years move on.

If Christianity is really true, then it involves the whole man, including his intellect and creativeness. Christianity is not just 'dogmatically' true or 'doctrinally' true. Rather, it is true to what is there, true in the whole area of the whole man in all of life.

Christianity is realistic because it says that if there is no truth, there is also no hope; and there can be no truth if there is no adequate base. It is prepared to face the consequences of being proved false and say with Paul: If you find the body of Christ, the discussion is finished, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. It leaves absolutely no room for a romantic answer.

The moral absolutes rest upon God's character. The moral commands He has given to men are an expression of His character. Men as created in His image are to live by choice on the basis of what God is. The standards of morality are determined by what conforms to His character, while those things which do not conform are immoral.

The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.

Christianity is not a series of truths in the plural, but rather truth spelled with a capital 'T.' Truth about total reality, not just about religious things. Biblical Christianity is Truth concerning total reality - and the intellectual holding of that total Truth and then living in the light of that Truth.

‎People have presuppositions... By 'presuppositions' we mean the basic way that an individual looks at life- his worldview. The grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. A person's presuppositions provide the basis for their values- and therefore the basis for their decisions.

The Christian in the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.

True spirituality consists in living moment to moment by the grace of Jesus Christ.

The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus which surrounds us. All these are dangerous but not the primary threat. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually corporately, tending to do the Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.

Ours is a post-Christian world in which Christianity, not only in the number of Christians but in cultural emphasis and cultural result, is no longer the consensus or ethos of our society.

If there is no absolute by which to judge society, society is absolute.

Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.

Today the separation of church and state is America is used to silence the church... The way the concept is used today is totally reversed from the original intent... It is used today as a false political dictum in order to restrict the influence of Christian ideas... To have suggested the state separated from religion and religious influence would have amazed the Founding Fathers.

We must stress that the basis for our faith is neither experience nor emotion but the truth as God has given it in verbalized, prepositional form in the Scripture and which we first of all apprehend with our minds.

Apostasy must be called what it is, spiritual adultery.

The purpose of apologetics is not just to win an argument or a discussion, but that people with whom we are in contact may become Christians and then live under the Lordship of Christ in the whole spectrum of life.

No work of art is more important than the Christian's life, and every Christian is called to be an artist in this sense... The Christian's life is to be a thing of truth and also a thing of beauty in the midst of a lost and despairing world.

Thank God for the reality for which we were created, a moment-by-moment communication with God himself.

If Christians win a battle by using worldly means, they have really lost.

Christianity is the greatest intellectual system the mind of man has ever touched.

Just because something is beautifully written does not mean it is true.

God has ordained the state as a delegated authority; it is not autonomous. The state is to be an agent of justice, to restrain evil by punishing the wrongdoer, and to protect the good in society. When it does the reverse, it has no proper authority. It is then a usurped authority and as such it becomes lawless and is tyranny.

The Bible is clear here: I am to love my neighbor as myself, in the manner needed, in a practical way, in the midst of the fallen world, at my particular point of history. This is why I am not a pacifist. Pacifism in this poor world in which we live -- this lost world -- means that we desert the people who need our greatest help.

Truth always carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation nevertheless. If our reflex action is always accommodation regardless of the centrality of the truth involved, there is something wrong.

A compassionate open home is part of Christian responsibility, and should be practiced up to the level of capacity.

Christianity provides a unified answer for the whole of life.

Our trusting the Lord does not mean that there are not times of tears. I think it is a mistake as Christians to act as though trusting the Lord and tears are not compatible.

Christianity is not just involved with "salvation", but with the total man in the total world. The Christian message begins with the existence of God forever, and then with creation. It does not begin with salvation. We must be thankful for salvation, but the Christian message is more than that. Man has a value because he is made in the image of God.

If there is no absolute beyond man's ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.

Humanism is not wrong in its cry for sociological healing, but humanism is not producing it.

If we do not show love to one another, the world has a right to question whether Christianity is true.

We as Bible-believing evangelical Christians are locked in a battle. This is not a friendly gentleman's discussion. It is a life and death conflict between the spiritual hosts of wickedness and those who claim the name of Christ.

We must not only be True. We must be Beautiful.

There is no place in God's world where there are no people who will come and share a home as long as it is a real home.

Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful - Christian community is the final apologetic.

If you want a significant man, with absolutes, morality, and meaning, then you must have what the Bible insists upon - that God will judge men justly, and they will not be able to raise their voices because of the base upon which He judges them.

Eve doubted God, and I as a child of God am now to be exactly the opposite: I am to believe him. Eve doubted, and mankind in revolt doubts God. To believe him, not just when I accept Christ as Savior, but every moment, one moment at a time: this is the Christian life, and this is true spirituality.

There are two main reasons why we may not be bringing forth the fruit we should. It may be because of ignorance, because we may never have been taught the meaning of the work of Christ for our present lives.

If the church is what it should be, young people will be there. But they will not just 'be there' - they will be there with the blowing of horns and the clashing of high-sounding cymbals, and they will come dancing with flowers in their hair.

Truth carries with it confrontation.

We should not view men with a cynical eye, seeing them only as meaningless products of chance, but, on the other hand, we should not go to the opposite extreme of seeing them romantically. To do either is to fail to understand who men really are--creatures made in the image of God but fallen.

If there is no final place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous, and as such, it has been put in the place of the living God.

The soul is not more important than the body. God made the whole man and the whole man is important.

Sometimes the greatest deterrent to a great marriage is believing you have a perfect marriage.

Tell me what the world is saying today, and I'll tell you what the church will be saying in seven years.

What we, the Christian community, have to do is to refuse men the right to ravish our land, just as we refuse them the right to ravish our women; to insist that somebody accepts a little less profit by not exploiting nature.

I believe that pluralistic secularism, in the long run, is a more deadly poison than straightforward persecution.

Modern man has both feet firmly planted in mid-air

In the flesh rather than the work of the Spirit, it is easy to say we are showing holiness and it only be egotistic pride and hardness.

All men bear the image of God. They have value not because they are redeemed, but because they are God's creation in God's image.

Man is indeed lost, but that does not mean that he is nothing. We must resist humanism, but to make a man a zero is not the right way to resist it ... [The] Christian position is that man is made in the image of God and even though he is now a sinner, he can do things that are tremendous - he can influence history for this life and the life to come, for himself and for others...From the biblical viewpoint, man is lost, but great.

God has communicated to man, the infinite to the finite. The One who made man capable of language in the first place has communicated to man in language about both spiritual reality and physical reality, about the nature of God and the nature of man.

Any denomination or church group that forsakes inerrancy will end up shipwrecked. It is impossible to prevent the surrender of other important doctrinal teachings of the Word of God when inerrancy is gone.

As my son Frankie put it, Humanism has changed the Twenty-third Psalm: They began - I am my shepherd. Then - Sheep are my shepherd. Then - Everything is my shepherd. Finally - Nothing is my shepherd.

And the purpose of our creation, in which all our subsidiary purposes fit, is to be in a personal relationship to God, in communion with him, in love, by choice, the creature before the Creator.

Are you still thirsting? Christ gives the invitation not only to others but to you. He is the fountainhead. He has died and is risen. He offers the only way to eternal life, asking only that you admit your need, raise the empty hands of faith, and accept His gift. What is eternal life? It is meaning in life now as well as living one‚s life forever. Drink deep. Jesus offers a brimming cup.

We must remember throughout our lives that in God's sight there are no little people and no little places. Only one thing is important: to be consecrated persons in God's place for us, at each moment.

This shift from the Judeo-Christian basis for law and the shift away from the restraints of the Constitution automatically militates against religious liberty.

If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong.

Modern man has no real "value" for the ocean. All he has is the most crass form of egoist, pragmatic value for it. He treats it as a "thing" in the worst possible sense, to exploit it for the "good" of man. The man who believes things are there only by chance cannot give things a real value. But for the Christian the value of a thing is not in itself autonomously, but because God made it.

Doctrinal rightness and rightness of ecclesiastical position are important, but only as a starting point to go on into a living relationship - and not as ends in themselves.

The modern concept of separation is an argument for a total separation of religion from the state. The consequence of the acceptance of the doctrine leads to the removal of religion as an influence in civil government.