Cherrii > Cherrii's Quotes

“A god’s voice had once shattered my whole life. They are not to be mistaken. It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal’s voice for a god’s. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god’s voice takes it for a mortal’s.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“I ought to have judged by deeds and not by words.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Litte Prince

“I think God wants us to love Him more, not to love creatures (even animals) less. We love everything in one way too much (i.e. at the expense of our love for Him) but in another way we love everything too little.

No person, animal, flower, or even pebble, has ever been loved too much—i.e. more than every one of God’s works deserves.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

“We struggle with the thought that his love is so strong and his desire to bless is so intense. Our deeply ingrained work ethic causes us to view everything God does in utilitarian terms. If God does something, it must be because he wants us to do something in return. To think he might just want us to enjoy it is a bit of a stretch for us [...]

In reality, God might not want us to do anything with a blessing except to enjoy it, to love it, to be stunned by the beauty of it, to be overwhelmed by the grace of it, to share the blessing with others. It brings joy to a parent to see their child enjoying something they’d given him or her.”
― Noel S. Due, Embracing God as Father: Christian Identity in the Family of God

“Don’t you think the things people are most ashamed of are the things they can’t help?”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

“Conflict is the price you pay for intimacy. Read that sentence again, and let it sink in. If you want to connect genuinely with other people, you have to risk conflict by being frank and firm in addition to gracious and loving.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Girl: When Just Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts You, Your Family, and Your Friends

“Can you be more saved than you were the first day of your salvation? No. But can a person grow in salvation? Absolutely. It, like marriage, is a done deal and a daily development.”
― Max Lucado, He Chose the Nails: What God Did to Win Your Heart

“God blesses us according to the riches of his glory. He doesn’t give us just something out of the storehouse of his riches; he gives according to his riches.

We think he gives like we do. We think if we are good, he might give us something we want. We think he might show us a bit of affection, or have some mercy on us when we are in need.

But what God is able to do, and is doing, is far more abundant “than all that we ask or think” (Eph 3:20). God holds nothing back.”
― Noel S. Due, Embracing God as Father: Christian Identity in the Family of God

“You have the freedom not to provide an answer to every question that comes your way.

Jesus didn’t answer every question posed to him, and you don’t have to either.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Girl: When Just Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts You, Your Family, and Your Friends

“Those who keep secrets from God keep their distance from God. Those who are honest with God draw near to God.”
― Max Lucado, In the Grip of Grace: You Can't Fall Beyond His Love

“The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God's eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing does dome tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.

It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Somehow Christians have gotten a reputation as anti-pleasure, and this despite the fact that they believe pleasure was an invention of the Creator himself. We Christians have a choice. We can present ourselves as uptight bores who sacrificially forfeit half the fun of life by limiting our indulgence in sex, food, and other sensual pleasures. Or we can set about enjoying pleasure to the fullest, which means enjoying it in the way the Creator intended.”
― Philip Yancey, I Was Just Wondering

“We are in no position to draw up maps of God’s psychology, and prescribe limits to His interests.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics

“The grace of God can’t be owned, bought, or earned. It’s free and it’s never going to end, because we never get to the end of God.”
― Noel S. Due, Embracing God as Father: Christian Identity in the Family of God

“Since your access to God isn’t based on what you do but wholly based on what Christ has done, it can’t be lost.”
― Noel S. Due, Embracing God as Father: Christian Identity in the Family of God

“God won’t force you to become something he never designed you to be. He created you. God wants to take your personality, your temperament, your talents, your experiences and give you a new character, new attitudes, new abilities, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit so you can reach your full potential.”
― Lee Strobel, God's Outrageous Claims: Discover What They Mean for You

“Even Jesus gave people a dose of Vitamin No sometimes.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Girl: When Just Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts You, Your Family, and Your Friends

“Every institution, it seems, runs on ungrace and its insistence that we earn our way.”
― Philip Yancey, What's So Amazing About Grace?

“When you are asked for trust you may give it or withhold it; it is senseless to say that you will trust if you are given demonstrative certainty. There would be no room for trust if demonstration were given.”
― C.S. Lewis, The World's Last Night: And Other Essays

“We believe that His intention is to create a certain personal relation between Himself and us, a relation really sui generis but analogically describable in terms of filial or of erotic love. Complete trust is an ingredient in that relation—such trust as could have no room to grow except where there is also room for doubt. To love involves trusting the beloved beyond the evidence, even against much evidence. No man is our friend who believes in our good intentions only when they are proved. No man is our friend who will not be very slow to accept evidence against them.”
― C.S. Lewis, The World's Last Night: And Other Essays

“Few things once seemed to me more frigid and far-fetched than those interpretations […] of the Song of Songs, which identify the Bridegroom with Christ and the bride with the Church. Indeed, as we read the frank erotic poetry of the latter and contrast it with the edifying headlines in our Bibles, it is easy to be moved to a smile, even a cynically knowing smile, as if the pious interpreters were feigning an absurd innocence. […]
First, the language of nearly all great mystics, not even in a common tradition, some of them Pagan, some Islamic, most Christian, confronts us with evidence that the image of marriage, of sexual union, is not only profoundly natural but almost inevitable as a means of expressing the desired union between God and man. The very word ‘union’ has already entailed some such idea.
Secondly, the god as bridegroom, his ‘holy marriage’ with the goddess, is a recurrent theme and a recurrent ritual in many forms of Paganism […] And if, as I believe, Christ, in transcending and thus abrogating, also fulfils, both Paganism and Judaism, then we may expect that He fulfils this side of it too. This, as well as all else, is to be ‘summed up’ in Him.
Thirdly, the idea appears, in a slightly different form, within Judaism. For the mystics God is the Bridegroom of the individual soul. For the Pagans, the god is the bridegroom of the mother-goddess, the earth, but his union with her also makes fertile the whole tribe and its livestock, so that in a sense he is their bridegroom too. The Judaic conception is in some ways closer to the Pagan than to that of the mystics, for in it the Bride of God is the whole nation, Israel. This is worked out in one of the most moving and graphic chapters of the whole Old Testament (Ezek. 16).
Finally, this is transferred in the Apocalypse from the old Israel to the new, and the Bride becomes the Church, ‘the whole blessed company of faithful people’. It is this which has, like the unworthy bride in Ezekiel, been rescued, washed, clothed, and married by God—a marriage like King Cophetua’s.”
― C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses

“Whatever lays the first stress on behaviour or achievement; on orthodoxy, theological, moral, or social; on conformity to a system, a church, a moral type, or a code of conduct; on mere sinlessness, blamelessness, propriety, piety, or sanctity of an unearthly type—that is a departure from the Gospel idea of perfection; which is completeness of trust, and the definite self-assignment of faith amid much imperfection.”
― Noel S. Due, Embracing God as Father: Christian Identity in the Family of God

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem [...] how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.” The disciples had proposed that Jesus call down fire on unrepentant cities; in contrast, Jesus uttered a cry of helplessness, an astonishing “if only” from the lips of the Son of God. He would not force himself on those who were not willing.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.”
― C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“Christian community, then, is not something to be attained—an idealistic project—but is already a divine reality experienced as we relate to each other in Christ. It’s not primarily a unity of head (mental or cognitive; signing up to the same policies and platforms), although this is not to be ignored.

Rather, it’s a unity of heart, a unity in the Spirit characterized by the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal 5:22–23).

In Christ, then, we are united in a worshipful community even to those who may not share our exact individual theological convictions and to those who for a time may regard me as their enemy. We are brothers and sisters to many whose language, culture, and church traditions are very different from ours, and they are one with each of us, even if we’ve never met.”
― Noel S. Due, Embracing God as Father: Christian Identity in the Family of God

“Being friendly to everybody, he very often has no friends for himself.
Always consulting and giving advice, he often has nobody to go to with his own pains and problems. [...]
Looking for acceptance, he tends to cling to his counselees [...]
In this way he […] never feels safe, is always on the alert, and finally finds himself terribly misunderstood and lonesome.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Intimacy

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity