No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God.
Interpretation
People do not reject Christianity due to lack of evidence, but rather due to a preference for sin over righteousness.
This quote by William Lane Craig emphasizes that the rejection of Christianity is not primarily an intellectual issue involving logical arguments or evidence, but instead a moral one. It suggests that individuals choose to remain in spiritual darkness because they are unwilling to confront their flaws and seek a relationship with God, indicating a deeper alignment with their desires rather than a genuine search for truth.
In practice
This quote can be used in a sermon to highlight the moral choices people face regarding faith.
Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God.
The Christian faith does not call for us to put our minds on the shelf, to fly in the face of common sense and history, or to make a leap of faith into the dark. The rational person, fully apprised of the evidence, can confidently believe.
Our churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. One result of this is an immature, superficial faith. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith.
It's no longer enough to teach our children Bible stories; they need doctrine and apologetics.
Scepticism, ironically, draws its life's blood from claims to have a good deal of knowledge. For example, your friends claim to know, 'Since every possible option has not been explored, nothing can be said for certain.' That statement is itself a claim to knowledge!
If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all
And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: ‘A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound change.’ Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely.
It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas
As you you deeply into your own awareness, and relax the self-contraction, and dissolve into the empty ground of your own primordial experience, the simply feeling of Being-right now, right here-is it not obvious at once?
Who has a harder fight than he who is striving to overcome himself.
. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.