The Kingdom of Heaven is not for the well-meaning: it is for the desperate. … James Denney (1856-1917)

The sacred page is not meant to be the end, but only the means toward the end, which is knowing God himself. … A. W. Tozer (1897-1963)

Faith is required of thee, and a sincere life, not loftiness of intellect, nor deepness in the mysteries of God. If thou understandest not… the things which are beneath thee, how shalt thou comprehend those which are above thee? Submit thyself unto God, and humble thy sense to faith, and the light of knowledge shall be given thee, as shall be profitable and necessary unto thee. … Thomas a Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ [1418]

The sort of love I have been describing… can also be felt for bodies that claim more than a natural affection: for a Church or (alas) a party in a Church, or for a religious order. This terrible subject would require a book to itself. Here it will be enough to say that the Heavenly Society is also an earthly society. Our (merely natural) patriotism towards the latter can very easily borrow the transcendent claims of the former and use them to justify the most abominable actions. If ever the book which I am not going to write is written, it must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom’s specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery. Large areas of “the World” will not hear us till we have publicly disowned much of our past. Why should they? We have shouted the name of Christ and enacted the service of Moloch. … C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Four Loves

Eternal life is not an unending continuance of this life — that would, perhaps, be Hell — but Eternal Life is quite a different life, divine, not mundane; perfect, not earthly; true life, not corrupt half-life. We cannot form a conception of Eternal Life. What we imagine is ever simply of the earth, temporal, worldly. Nor could we know anything about our eternal life if it had not appeared in Jesus Christ. In him we realize that we were created for the eternal life. If we ask, what is this eternal life? what sense is there in thinking about it if we can have no conception of it?, the answer is, “It is life with God, in God, from God; life in perfect fellowship.” Therefore it is a life in love, it is love itself. It is a life without the nature of death and sin, hence without sorrow, pain, anxiety, care, misery. To know this suffices to make one rejoice in eternal life. If there were no eternal life, this life of time would be without meaning, goal, or purpose, without significance, without seriousness and without joy. It would be nothing. That our life does not end in nothing, but that eternal life awaits us, is the glad message of Jesus Christ. He came to give us this promise as a light in this dark world. A Christian is a man who has become certain of eternal life through Jesus Christ. … Emil Brunner (1889-1966), Our Faith

The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God; the tragedy is that, knowing Him, they still insist on going their own way. … William Barclay, The Revelation of John (Vol.II) [1961]

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