Inspirational Quotes by Lee Strobel

“Christianity did not begin with a group of people trying to remember and follow Jesus' teaching even though he was dead. It began with the belief that God had vindicated Jesus as the Messiah by raising him from the dead. This is why one would be completely mistaken to think that Jesus was a good teacher whose followers eventually developed a myth about his being the Son of God. There would be no Christian movement today if his original followers had not been convinced that he had really risen from the dead.”

“People do not reject the gospel primarily because they’re too thickheaded to get it. Unbelief grows out of other soils besides intellectual confusion. Instead, people reject the good news because they’re enslaved to other kinds of news. They’re in love with something unworthy of such devotion, and it won’t let them go.”

“determine”

“Interested is interesting.”

“I’m not looking for perfect, but I am looking for real.”

“First, if we live in a purely natural, physical world governed by the “cause and effect” relationships between chemical processes in our brains, “free will” is an illusion, and the idea of true moral choice is nonsensical. How can I, as a detective, hold a murderer accountable for a series of chemical reactions that occurred in his brain when he didn’t have the freedom to escape the causal chain of biological events?”

“If we disqualify legitimate discussion, we compromise our ability to know the truth.”

“If there are good reasons why God might permit evil in this life (such as the preservation of free will and the ability to love genuinely), concerns about His failure to act are simply unreasonable. Doubts about God’s existence based on the problem of evil may have emotional appeal, but they lack rational foundation because reasonable explanations do, in fact, exist.”

“Asking questions enables you to escape the charge, “You’re twisting my words.” A question is a request for clarification specifically so you don’t twist their words.”

“C. S. Lewis notes: My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I gotten this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call something crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. 5 This is precisely the problem for the atheist. He must answer the question: Where does the moral scoring system come from that allows one to identify evil in the first place? Where is the transcendent standard of objective good that makes the whole notion of evil intelligible? Are moral laws the product of chance? If so, why obey them? What —or who —establishes how things are supposed to be?”

“G. K. Chesterton saw the problem over half a century ago: [The modernist] goes first to a political meeting where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts. Then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting where he proves that they practically are beasts. . . . In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality, and in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men.”

“But your love goes beyond that. You can know all these things about your wife and not be in love with her and put your trust in her, but you do. So the decision goes beyond the evidence, yet it is there also on the basis of the evidence. So it is with falling in love with Jesus. To have a relationship with Jesus Christ goes beyond just knowing the historical facts about him, yet it's rooted in the historical facts about him.”

“But of the many things he did, one of the most striking to me is his forgiving of sin.” “Really?” I said, shifting in my chair, which was perpendicular to his, in order to face him more directly. “How so?” “The point is, if you do something against me, I have the right to forgive you. However, if you do something against me and somebody else comes along and says, ‘I forgive you,’ what kind of cheek is that? The only person who can say that sort of thing meaningfully is God himself, because sin, even if it is against other people, is first and foremost a defiance of God and his laws. “When David sinned by committing adultery and arranging the death of the woman’s husband, he ultimately says to God in Psalm 51, ‘Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.’ He recognized that although he had wronged people, in the end he had sinned against the God who made him in his image, and God needed to forgive him.”

“Only in a world where faith is difficult can faith exist. I don’t have faith in two plus two equals four or in the noonday sun. Those are beyond question. But Scripture describes God as a hidden God. You have to make an effort of faith to find him. There are clues you can follow. “And if that weren’t so, if there were something more or less than clues, it’s difficult for me to understand how we could really be free to make a choice about him. If we had absolute proof instead of clues, then you could no more deny God than you could deny the sun. If we had no evidence at all, you could never get there. God gives us just enough evidence so that those who want him can have him. Those who want to follow the clues will.”

“An equal-opportunity phenomenon, the World Wide Web doesn’t discriminate between sober-minded scholars and delusional crackpots, leaving visitors without a reliable filter to determine what’s trustworthy and what’s not.”

“—Jesús, en forma intencional, se dejó caer en las manos del que lo traicionó, no se resistió al arresto, no se defendió en el juicio: resulta claro que estaba dispuesto a someterse a lo que usted describió como una forma de tortura humillante y agonizante. Y yo quisiera saber por qué. ¿Qué puede haber motivado a una persona a que acepte soportar ese tipo de castigo? Alexander Metherell, esta vez el hombre, no el doctor, buscó las palabras justas. —Francamente no creo que una persona común pudiera haberlo hecho —respondió por fin—. Sin embargo, Jesús sabía lo que le esperaba y estuvo dispuesto a padecerlo porque esa era la única forma de redimirnos: haciendo de sustituto nuestro y pagando la pena de muerte que merecemos por nuestra rebelión contra Dios. Esa fue toda su misión al venir a la tierra. Habiendo dicho eso, aun podía percibir que la mente de Mether-ell, racional, lógica y organizada sin tregua continuaba desmenuzando mi pregunta hasta llegar a la respuesta más básica e irreducible. —Por lo tanto, cuando usted me pregunta qué lo motivó —concluyó—, bien… supongo que la respuesta se puede resumir en una sola palabra; y esa sería amor.”

“We can’t treat the Bible with kid gloves. We really need to wrestle with the issues, because our faith depends on it.”

“if the gospels had been identical to each other, word for word, this would have raised charges that the authors had conspired among themselves to coordinate their stories in advance, and that would have cast doubt on them.”

“By far the most common differences simply show us that scribes in the ancient world could spell no better than most people can today”

“Ah, but let’s consider Communion for a moment,” he replied. “What’s odd is that these early followers of Jesus didn’t get together to celebrate his teachings or how wonderful he was. They came together regularly to have a celebration meal for one reason: to remember that Jesus had been publicly slaughtered in a grotesque and humiliating way. “Think about this in modern terms. If a group of people loved John F. Kennedy, they might meet regularly to remember his confrontation with Russia, his promotion of civil rights, and his charismatic personality. But they’re not going to celebrate the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered him!”