Top 69 Quotes & Sayings by Lee Strobel

There are Eastern religions that deny the reality of pain and suffering. They just try to wipe it away by saying it's all an illusion.

Intelligent design is consistent with any faith system I can think of, because most faith systems believe that there is a creator.

So much of the world's suffering results from the sinful action or inaction of ourselves and others. For example, people look at a famine and wonder where God is, but the world produces enough food for each person to have 3,000 calories a day. It's our own irresponsibility and self-centeredness that prevents people from getting fed.

My worldview, my philosophy, my attitudes, my relationships, my parenting, my marriage - everything has been transformed by my relationship with Christ.

Nobody is beyond the reach of the Gospel.

I am primarily a writer of books, and I enjoy that. But I come to realize that a lot of people prefer a visual medium.

When you are in the midst of suffering you are looking for someone to be Jesus to you. You are looking for someone to love you and help take care of you, and reach out to you.

Virtually every scientist now concedes that universe and time itself had beginning. So, whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe must have had a cause.

I do know plenty of atheists, agnostics and skeptics who have become Christians through the years. In fact, several of my friends were once strong atheists but are now committed followers of Jesus.

Apologetics has an important place in the local church as we seek to influence our communities for Christ in an increasingly skeptical culture.

The Internet has helped atheists and agnostics coalesce as never before.

All Christians should be able to articulate reasons why they believe what they believe - not just for the sake of our spiritually confused friends, but also so that we ourselves will have a deeper and more confident faith.

I certainly believe that God did create the world, yeah, absolutely I believe that.

Christians can have doubts and they can have questions, and the unhealthy way to deal with that is to keep them inside where they fester and grow and can undermine our faith. The healthy way to deal with it is to talk about it and be honest about it.

Christianity is a very historical religion - it makes specific claims that are open to testing.

I think it's very healthy to use journalistic and legal techniques to investigate the evidence for and against Christianity and other faith systems.

If you define evolution as merely meaning change over time, then I don't see any problem with a person being a Christian and believing in evolution. But that's not how textbooks define evolution. They define evolution as being random and undirected without plan or purpose.

Moral evil is the immorality and pain and suffering and tragedy that come because we choose to be selfish, arrogant, uncaring, hateful and abusive.

It is very difficult to give a 15 second sound bite on why there is pain and suffering in this world and not have it come off as being flippant or surface level or superficial.

A lot of people don't give much thought to what they believe, and it's easy for them to hold what often are two conflicting ideas in their head at the same time.

I went to a psychologist friend and said if 500 people claimed to see Jesus after he died, it was just a hallucination. He said hallucinations are an individual event. If 500 people have the same hallucination, that's a bigger miracle than the resurrection.

If Jesus is the Son of God, his teachings are more than just good ideas from a wise teacher; they are divine insights on which I can confidently build my life.

Science itself is steadily nailing the lid on atheism's coffin.

I’ve seen far too many Christians who are more than willing to travel halfway around the world to volunteer for a week in an orphanage, but who cannot bring themselves to take the personal risk of sharing Jesus with the co-worker who sits day after day in the cubicle right next to them.

Hell was not part of the original creation. Hell is God's fall-back position. Hell is something God was forced to make because people chose to rebel against him and turn against what was best for them and the purpose for which they were created.

Jesus is my forgiver, my leader, and my friend.

I don't feel like I was argued into the faith, but I feel like the evidence knocked down a succession of objections and issues and questions and doubts that I had, that sort of cleared the pathway for me to come to the faith.

I think the Resurrection continues to be a pivotal issue, a pivotal question for people. I think a lot of other issues have been raised in interim years, about the nature of truth, of course gender issues, issues involving social matters like abortion and euthanasia and so forth, those swirl about and change from time to time, but I think the fundamental question of whether or not Christianity is true ultimately goes back to the Resurrection.

Paul said in I Corinthians 15:17, if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile. So that's the linchpin of the Christian faith, is whether Jesus did indeed, A, live, B, die, and C, was resurrected from the dead, which authenticated his claims of divinity.

Believing the right things about Jesus isn't enough. You're not adopted as God's child until you confess and turn away from your wrongdoing and receive the freely offered gift of forgiveness and eternal life that Jesus purchased with his death on the cross. Until you do that, you'll always be on the outside looking in.

Doubts can produce positive side-effects - if you work toward resolving them.

I'm noticing an exciting trend around the country: a resurgence of interest in Christian apologetics (the defense of the faith). This is a reaction to the current attacks on the essentials of Christianity that are coming from militant atheists, radical professors, and Internet gadflies.

For me, apologetics proved to be the turning point of my life and eternity. I'm thankful for the scholars who so passionately and effectively defend the truth of Christianity - and today my life's goal is to do my part in helping others get answers to the questions that are blocking them in their spiritual journey toward Christ.

Courage would be impossible in a world without pain.

I have a good Muslim friend who comes over to my house. Good guy; reads the Qur'an in Arabic. He comes over to my house and we talk about faith and we talk about things we have in common, but I can't shy away from the differences that we have. So I talk about why I'm not a Muslim and about the evidence that exists that show Christianity is true.

Acrid bitterness inevitably seeps into the lives of people who harbor grudges and suppress anger, and bitterness is always a poison. It keeps your pain alive instead of letting you deal with it and get beyond it. Bitterness sentences you to relive the hurt over and over.

I was thoroughly stunned by the quantity and quality of the evidence for Christ.

In short, I didn't become a Christian because God promised I would have an even happier life than I had as an atheist. He never promised any such thing. Indeed, following him would inevitably bring divine demotions in the eyes of the world. Rather, I became a Christian because the evidence was so compelling that Jesus really is the one-and-only Son of God who proved his divinity by rising from the dead. That meant following him was the most rational and logical step I could possibly take.

Christians can have doubts and they can have questions and the unhealthy way to deal with that is to keep them inside where they fester and grow and can undermine our faith. The healthy way to deal with it is to talk about it and be honest about it.

I think there's a faith formula in that verse: believe plus receive equals become. So I think believing's important, having intellectual agreement with Christian doctrine is important, but there has to be a time when we receive God's gift of grace - not that we've earned it or merit it or deserve it - but receive this free gift of forgiveness and eternal life that Jesus purchased on the cross for us.

There is no way you can harmonize neo-Darwinism and Christianity.

Often it is hard. So hard, in fact, that Jesus' decree to love and pray for our opponents is regarded as one of the most breathtaking and gut-wrenching challenges of his entire Sermon on the Mount, a speech renowned for its outrageous claims. There was no record of any other spiritual leader ever having articulated such a clear-cut, unambiguous command for people to express compassion to those who are actively working against their best interests.

Only in a world where faith is difficult can faith exist.

My worldview, my philosophy, my attitudes, my relationships, my parenting, my marriage -- everything has been transformed by my relationship with Christ.

In a world where spiritual confusion is increasing, GodQuest helps bring clarity and conviction. This is a terrific resource for developing a solid foundation for faith.

I think fundamentally, the question of whether or not Christianity makes sense - whether it withstands scrutiny, whether the evidence supports it or hurts it - always comes down to the Resurrection.

It was the evidence from science and history that prompted me to abandon my atheism and become a Christian.

I find the evidence for the deity of Jesus and the reliability of the Bible to be powerful and persuasive, and that evidence has only gotten stronger over the years.

The Resurrection is the supreme vindication of Jesus' divine identity and his inspired teaching. It's the proof of his triumph over sin and death. It's the foreshadowing of the resurrection of his followers. It's the basis of Christian hope. It's the miracle of all miracles.

Few things accelerate the peace process as much as humbly admitting our own wrongdoing and asking forgiveness.

If your friend is sick and dying, the most important thing he wants is not an explanation; he wants you to sit with him. He's terrified of being alone more than anything else. So, God has not left us alone.

I think people who believe that life emerged naturalistically need to have a great deal more faith than people who reasonably infer that there's an Intelligent Designer.

Faith is taking a step in the same direction that the evidence is pointing.

The universe is a soul making machine, and part of that process is learning, maturing, and growing through difficult and challenging and painful experiences. The point of our lives in this world isn't comfort, but training and preparation for eternity.

Looking at the doctrine of Darwinism, which undergirded my atheism for so many years, it didn’t take me long to conclude that it was simply too far-fetched to be credible. I realized that if I were to embrace Darwinism and its underlying premise of naturalism, I would have to believe that: 1. Nothing produces everything 2. Non-life produces life 3. Randomness produces fine-tuning 4. Chaos produces information 5. Unconsciousness produces consciousness 6. Non-reason produces reason....The central pillars of evolutionary theory quickly rotted away when exposed to scrutiny.

I don't believe in reincarnation because there's an expert on this question, and he's Jesus of Nazareth. He's the only person in history who died, rose from the dead, and spoke authoritatively on this question. And Jesus says reincarnation doesn't happen. He says that there's only one death and after that comes the judgment.

Whereas much of what we know from ancient history is derived from one or two sources, we have no fewer than nine ancient sources, inside and outside the New Testament, corroborating the disciples' conviction that they encountered the resurrected Jesus. That's an avalanche of data.

If life can emerge just from naturalistic circumstances, then God is out of a job.

There's no way you could convince me today that Jesus is not real.

If God so precisely and carefully and lovingly and amazingly constructed a mind-boggling habitat for his creatures, then it would be natural for Him to want them to explore it, to measure it, to investigate it, to appreciate it, to be inspired by it - and ultimately, and most importantly, to find Him through it.