Tom Wilcox > Tom's Quotes

“Read and listen to one thinker and you become a clone; Read two and you become confused; Read ten and you get your own voice; Read a hundred and you start to become wise.”
― Tim Keller

“When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves--that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.”
― N.T. Wright

“The gospel is the gospel of the cross.”
― Kazoh Kitamori, Theology of the Pain of God: The First Original Theology From Japan

“Everything hinges on the Christ of the cross. The fact of the cross is the axiom of theological thought. It is impossible to think about the gospel if we have the slightest hesitation on this point. We must determine to carry this theme throughout all the problems of theology without exception... The essence of God can be comprehended only from the 'word of the cross.”
― Kazoh Kitamori, Theology of the Pain of God: The First Original Theology From Japan

“Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)

“Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: "Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.”
― Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology

“The church is not a theological classroom. It is a conversion, confession, repentance, reconciliation, forgiveness and sanctification center, where flawed people place their faith in Christ, gather to know and love him better, and learn to love others as he designed.”
― Paul David Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change

“Forgiveness is a vertical commitment that is followed by a horizontal transaction.”
― Paul David tripp , What Did You Expect?: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage

“Fear not because your prayer is stammering, your words feeble, and your language poor. Jesus can understand you.”
― J.C. Ryle

“The yearning to know what cannot be known, to comprehend the incomprehensible, to touch and taste the unapproachable, arises from the image of God in the nature of man. Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its source.”
― A.W. Tozer

“Grace abounds in contemporary movies, books, novels, films and music. If God is not in the whirlwind, He may be in a Woody Allen film, or a Bruce Springsteen concert. Most people understand imagery and symbol better than doctrine and dogma. Images touch hearts and awaken imaginations. One theologian suggested that Springsteen's 'Tunnel of Love' album, in which he symbolically sings of sin, death, despair and redemption, is more important for Catholics than the Pope's last visit when he spoke of morality only in doctrinal propositions.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to see it as something done by us.”
― John Stott

“the work of salvation, in its full sense, is (1) about whole human beings, not merely souls; (2) about the present, not simply the future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us.”
― N.T. Wright

“we must never look at any sin in our past life in any way except that which leads us to praise God and to magnify His grace in Christ Jesus.”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures