Barnabas Piper > Barnabas's Quotes

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“Lament challenges the church to acknowledge real suffering and plead with God for his intervention. The”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times

“Shalom, therefore, does not eschew or diminish the role of the other or the reality of a suffering world. Instead, it embraces the suffering other as an instrumental aspect of well-being. Shalom requires lament.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times

“It is a wonderful thing to be born on this side of the cross, knowing the full-orbed gospel. It is an even better thing to be sealed and empowered by the Spirit of God at Jesus’s behest. The coming of the Spirit was a crazy dream for Moses; it was a distant hope for Ezekiel; but it is true for you.”
― Todd Miles, Superheroes Can’t Save You: Epic Examples of Historic Heresies

“Any alteration of Jesus, no matter how small, turns him into someone who cannot rescue humanity, who cannot re-create the cosmos, and who cannot reign over it as the great sovereign King.”
― Todd Miles, Superheroes Can’t Save You: Epic Examples of Historic Heresies

“Love is a strange fact - it hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. It makes no sense at all.”
― Leif Enger, So Brave, Young, and Handsome

“...you have to be godly to be wise ...”
― Derek Kidner

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“The time has come, it seems to me, when Christian men and women all over the world, should begin to look this evil (race prejudice) squarely in the face, and to set themselves earnestly to combat it, to deal with it as Christian men and women ought to deal with it; as Jesus Christ would have it dealt with.”
― Francis Grimke

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”—Charles Baudelaire
“The second greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he is the good guy”—Ken Ammi”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”
― Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities

“I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with. . . . The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is ‘to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.”
― C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms