Top 94 Quotes & Sayings by Charles Colson - Page 2

Culture is religion incarnate.

When God wanted to defeat sin, His ultimate weapon was the sacrifice of His own Son. On Christmas Day two thousand years ago, the birth of a tiny baby in an obscure village in the Middle East was God's supreme triumph of good over evil.

The average college graduate's proficient literacy in English [the ability to read lengthy, complex texts and draw complicated inferences] has declined from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent ten years later.

Lenin, Stalin, and Rakosi recognized that a renewed and purified Christianity was the only force that could move the masses as powerfully as the Marxist ideal could. They attacked it as the enemy that it was and is.

Genuine Christianity is more than a relationship with Jesus, as expressed in personal piety, church attendance, Bible study, and works of charity. It is more than discipleship, more than believing a system of doctrines about God. Genuine Christianity is a way of seeing and comprehending all reality. It is a worldview.

Frontline love. It is our one hope for breaking down barriers and for restoring the sense of community, of caring for one another, that our decadent, impersonalized culture has sucked out of us.

Redeeming culture is the never ending mission of the church.

I was deepening my understanding of what we call the cultural commission, the command to take dominion and bring righteousness to our culture.

The Bible has, amazingly- no doubt with supernatural grace-survived its critics. The harder tyrants try to eliminate it and skeptics dismiss it, the better read it becomes.

Hostility to religion is having an effect. In 1963, the number of Americans who said that they believed the Bible is literally true was 65%. Today, the number has dropped to 32%.

The Bible's power rests upon the fact that it is the reliable, errorless, and infallible Word of God.

Judeo-Christian revelation is not the negative influence secularists proclaim it to be. Rather, it is the taproot of our civilization.

Some labeled Jerry Falwell an American version of the Ayatollah Khomeni. People for the American Way, a group organized to counter the Moral Majority, launched a slick media campaign attaching the Nazi slur to the religious right.

The Bible-banned, burned, beloved-is more widely read and more frequently attacked than any other book in history.

It's part of the buzz of the city among Christians. It wouldn't surprise me that it got to George Bush. He reads, he picks stuff up, he talks to people. And he's pretty serious about his own Christian beliefs.

The modernists started with the assumption that science is the only source of sure knowledge, that nature is all there is, and thus that morality is merely a human invention that can be changed to meet changing circumstances in an evolving world.

The gospel of Jesus Christ must be the bad news of the conviction of sin before it can be the Good News of redemption. The truth is revealed in God's Holy Word; life can be lived only in absolute and disciplined submission to its authority.

Today's widespread relegation of religion to merely something people do only in the privacy of their homes or churches would have been unimaginable to the founders of the republic - even those who personally repudiated orthodox Christian faith.

The dynamism and freedom that characterizes the West is the product of Christianity's reforming itself and moving forward culturally. The ascendancy of the West is the story of the difference that Christianity makes, and it's a story we can't let our culture forget.

To turn away from the great questions and dilemmas of life is a tragedy, for the quest for meaning and truth makes life worth living.

Over the years since I became a Christian, I have always deliberately explained that I have 'accepted Jesus Christ.' These words are invariably translated into 'Colson's professed religious experience.' I discovered that one major U.S. daily, as a matter of policy, will not print the two words Jesus Christ together; when combined, the editor says, it represents an editorial judgment.

It would take a God with equal measures of truth, love, and justice to [give us a metanarrative]. Since I had abandoned that faith in God and considered myself secular, that wasn't a real option for me.

We humans, you see, have an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.

Many people are trying to remove religion from public life. Under the banner of pluralism, cultural and political leaders are seeking to push all talk about God out of the public arena.

Why, I wondered, is there such hostility to one faith in this Hindu culture that believes all roads lead to heaven? They should be the most tolerant of all. What is it about the Judeo-Christian message that makes it so offensive? Ironically, the Indians may understand the heart of the gospel - that Christ is King, with all that portends - better than many in the 'Christian' West.

That Solidarity was a religious movement no one, least of all the Soviets, can deny. In November 1981, Pravda denounced 'religious fanaticism' as a grave challenge to socialism; failure to contain it, Pravda said, was at the root of the problems in Poland.

Let's acknowledge that America's increasing decadence is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. When we tolerate trash on television, permit pornography to invade our homes via the Internet, and allow babies to be killed at the point of birth, we are inflaming radical Islam.

The church's job is to equip the saints for works of service in the world.

God is dead not because He doesn't exist, but because we live, play, procreate, govern, and die as though He doesn't.

The evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is more powerful than anything else we believe. By His resurrection Jesus proved He is who He says He is. Be confident in this truth. Stand on the Holy Word of God. Don't sell the world a false bill of goods. Preach the word. Defend the faith. Live the faith.

God uses prisons to train people for future roles of leadership or martyrdom.

Who speaks for God? He does quite nicely for Himself. Through His holy and infallible Word - and the quiet obedience of His servants.

We should always pray with as much earnestness as those who expect everything from God; we should always act with as much energy as those who expect everything from themselves.

I do not believe one can experience conversion or the fullness of the Christian life apart from the church.