Scott Schopper

“Where hearts and minds are hardened, it is the task of apologetics to challenge them and help pry them open. Apologetics therefore starts where the unbeliever is and focuses on what the unbeliever believes, but only because that is what is obscuring the good news of Jesus. Only when the inadequacies of that unbelief have been exposed is the unbeliever in a place to see and hear the good news for what it is. By Their Fruit As we saw, St. Paul describes the heart of all unbelief as a way of “suppressing the truth.” As such, unbelief cannot be other than partly true and partly false, though each unbeliever will have responded to the tension by taking it in either of two”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“schadenfreude,”
― Douglas Preston, The Obsidian Chamber

“The more fully we live into ourselves, the more impact we will have. Acting may get us the applause we want, but taking a risk on being ourselves is the only path toward true intimacy. And true intimacy, the exchange of affection between two people who are not lying, is transforming.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love . . . In a concentration camp, the guards possess almost unlimited power. By applying force, they can make you renounce your God, curse your family, work without pay, eat human excrement, kill and then bury your closest friend or even your own mother. All this is within their power. Only one thing is not: they cannot force you to love them. This fact may help explain why God sometimes seems shy to use his power. He created us to love him, but his most impressive displays of miracle—the kind we may secretly long for—do nothing to foster that love. As Douglas John Hall has put it, “God’s problem is not that God is not able to do certain things. God’s problem is that God loves. Love complicates the life of God as it complicates every life.” (Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God)”
― John Eldredge, Epic