{"author":"Eric Metaxas","author_id":"Eric+Metaxas","total_quotes":24,"quotes":[{"text":"Let anyone using those weasel words “freedom of worship” know, they have “freedom of worship” in China and it is meaningless and it is vile. “Freedom of worship” says you may do what you like in that building on Sunday mornings or whenever you like, but when you come out you will bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state. That is the antithesis of what the Founders meant in guaranteeing “freedom of religion.","author":"Eric Metaxas","tags":["discipleship","integrity","religious-freedom"],"id":25453,"author_id":"Eric+Metaxas"},{"text":"(Bonhoeffer's) change was not an ungainly, embarrassing leap from which he would have to retreat slightly when he gained more maturity and perspective. It was by all accounts a deepening consistent with what had gone before.","author":"Eric Metaxas","tags":["continuity","discipleship","maturation","sovereignty-of-god","spiritual-development"],"id":26407,"author_id":"Eric+Metaxas"},{"text":"Another version of the “Prosperity Gospel” or “Name It and Claim It” teaching has to do with finding a verse in the Bible and then “claiming” that verse. Proponents of this thinking believe that God must fulfill his promise to us in whatever verse we are “claiming” because what God says in his Word, the Bible, is true, and we can trust it to be true. So someone might pray: God, your Word says in Isaiah that by your stripes we are healed and I know you are not a liar and that your Word is true and I claim that Scripture in Jesus’s name and therefore I will be healed of this stomachache! We need to have faith in what the Bible says, but we have to be careful that we aren’t trying to force God to do what we want. That is arrogance rather than humility. God loves us, but we cannot demand things of him as though our faith is in charge rather than God.If someone believes it is our faith that heals us and forgets that it is God who does it, we should ask that person how much faith Lazarus had. Remember, he was decomposing in a tomb when Jesus raised him from death. His faith obviously didn’t matter. It was all God. It is God and God’s grace that heals, not our prayers and not our “faith.” Though we are exhorted by God to pray to him, we cannot compel him to do what we wish.","author":"Eric Metaxas","tags":["bible","god","miracles","prayer","prosperity-gospel"],"id":42984,"author_id":"Eric+Metaxas"},{"text":"Christianity contains within itself a germ hostile to the Church (Dietrich Bonhoeffer).","author":"Eric Metaxas","tags":["christianity","religion"],"id":48214,"author_id":"Eric+Metaxas"},{"text":"For Bonhoeffer, the relationship with God ordered everything else around it. A number of times he referred to the relationship with Jesus Christ as being like the cantus firmus of a piece of music. All the other parts of the music referred to it, and it held them together. To be true to God in the deepest way meant having such a relationship with him that one did not live legalistically by 'rules' or 'principles.' One could never separate one's actions from one's relationship to God. It was a more demanding and more mature level of obedience, and Bonhoeffer had come to see that the evil of Hitler was forcing Christians to go deeper in their obedience, to think harder about what God was asking. Legalistic religion was being shown to be utterly inadequate.","author":"Eric Metaxas","tags":["obedience","principles"],"id":119513,"author_id":"Eric+Metaxas"},{"text":"The battle for our culture must be waged at the level of the imagination.","author":"Eric Metaxas","tags":["creativity","imagination","persuasion"],"id":140168,"author_id":"Eric+Metaxas"},{"text":"They (theological liberals)seemed to know what the answer was supposed to be and weren’t much concerned with how to get there. They knew only that whatever answers the Fundamentalists came up with must be wrong.","author":"Eric Metaxas","tags":["arrogance","secularism"],"id":164914,"author_id":"Eric+Metaxas"},{"text":"Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God’s Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle; it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace. How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.","author":"Eric Metaxas","tags":["death","dying","faith"],"id":184449,"author_id":"Eric+Metaxas"},{"text":"Praying to God involves both us and God. God wants us to participate in what he is doing, and for sure one of the main ways we participate in what he is doing is by prayer. We can also participate in what he is doing by feeding the hungry and helping the poor and caring for the sick and giving of our resources to those who have little. God wants us to partner with him. So there is a paradox at work, and a mystery. On the one hand, the Bible says that apart from God we can do nothing. And yet, on the other hand, God invites us to do some things with him. This is at the heart of the mystery of prayer. God wants us to use our faith and to pray. But we can focus so much on the importance of our faith and our prayers that we forget about God and think it is our faith and our prayers that perform the miracle, rather than the God to whom we pray and in whom we have faith as we pray.","author":"Eric Metaxas","tags":["bible","faith","god","prayer"],"id":197881,"author_id":"Eric+Metaxas"},{"text":"Atheism tells him what he isn’t, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is.","author":"Eric Metaxas","tags":["atheism","identity"],"id":202422,"author_id":"Eric+Metaxas"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":24,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}