Shelly

“It is true that ever since the first disobedience in the Garden of Eden fallen human beings have been running away from God. Indeed, we are worse than fugitives; we are rebels who defy his authority and resist his love. And yet we are restless in our rebellion. Instinctively we know that the God we are trying to avoid is our only home. So at times we “feel after him.” We seek to find him whom we are simultaneously seeking to escape. Such is the paradox of our fallenness.”
― John R.W. Stott, Christ the Cornerstone: Collected Essays of John Stott

“Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the ‘cause’, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“And I’ve come to see that it’s through the deepest suffering that God has taught me the deepest lessons. And if we’ll trust Him for it, we can come through to the unshakable assurance that He’s in charge. He has a loving purpose. And He can transform something terrible into something wonderful. Suffering is never for nothing.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, Suffering Is Never for Nothing

“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 a 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 patronising nonsense about His being a great human”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works