Quotations on Faith

The following are quotations on the topic of "faith." Some are descriptions, definitions, examples et cetera. I haven't documented the authenticity of every quotation, but since the primary reason I quote them is to instruct and inspire, it is not really necessary to do so. This is especially true since faith is such a common subject of discussion that any quotes or conceptions from a famous person on faith may have been something he or she received and repeated from others (either verbatim or with slight modification). Also, I don't necessarily endorse a quotation "as is" without qualification. Faith is multi-faceted. A quotation on faith may address only one facet of faith without addressing other facets. In which case it might need to be balanced by other facets. The quotations below highlights different aspects and types (kinds) of faith. Since there are various senses of the word and/or concept.

I've described at least 15 types of the use of the word "faith" in the following blogpost:

Various Definitions of the Word "Faith"

Note too that I don't necessarily endorse the theological position of a person I quote. Not everyone quoted is (or was) a Christian or a genuine professing Christian (i.e. a person who professed to be Christian but didn't really possess Christ). In Christian theology faith is essential to receive salvation, please God, perform good works acceptable to God and especially in prayer. Justifying faith is non-meritorious. However, after one has been justified, faith (along with works) can be graciously meritorious for rewards. See John H. Gerstner's article "The Nature of Justifying Faith." What he says about post-justification works could also be said of post-justification faith. Related to faith are things like hope, trust, doubt, and unbelief. So, I've also included quotes about those type of topics.

Lastly, I recommend four more of my blogposts that are related to faith and one of my favorite books on prayer. 

  Faith According to C.S. Lewis

 
"Unveiling" The Hiddenness of God

 

Detecting and Finding God

George Mueller Quotes

These include quotes on faith in relation to prayer.

The Life of Prayer by A.B. Simpson

"God is, if I may so say, at the command of the prayer of faith; and in this respect is, as it were, under the power of his people; as princes, they have power with God, and prevail."
- Jonathan Edwards

"Faith in prayer has great power with God, a kind of command over him; it holds him to his word; it will not let him go without the blessing; nor let him alone till he has made good his promise; nor give him any rest, day nor night, till he has fulfilled the things to come concerning his sons."- John Gill Commentary on Isaiah 45:11

"Hope is a sort of universal blessing, and one of the greatest which God has granted to man. To mankind, in general, life would be intolerable without it; and it is as necessary as faith is even to the followers of God....Hope stands justly among the highest mercies of God."
- Adam Clarke in is Bible Commentary on Rom. 8:25

"When a heathen king objected to the missionary's testimony concerning the one living and true God, that he could not see Him, and therefore could not believe in Him, the missionary took the king into the courtyard, and asked him to look intently upon the sun, which was burning in high noon; and when the monarch replied that the attempt would blind him, the missionary answered, "If you cannot look even upon one of His servants without being dazzled by his brightness, how could you endure looking upon Himself?" "
- W. Pakenham Walsh, The Angel of the Lord, p. 2

"If I was a believer, I would not feel [that] God owed me an explanation. I'm not one of those atheists who thinks you can go around saying...complaining. I mean, if you make the assumption that there is a deity, then all things are possible. You just have to be able to make that assumption."
- atheist Christopher Hitchens in his debate with William Lane Craig at 2:19:55 into the debate.

"The true secret of pleasing God is to trust Him, to believe in His love to us, to be artless children, and to count ourselves beloved of God."
- A.B. Simpson in Wholly Sanctified

"Believe that God hears, and will in due time grant, believe his love and truth; believe that he is love, and therefore will not deny you; believe that he is truth, and therefore will not deny himself."
- Thomas Watson, The Ten Commandments

"Remember, also, that God delights to bestow blessing, but, generally, as the result of earnest, believing prayer."
- George Mueller

"I do not remember who it was, I think it was one of the Wesleys, who said that more men are ruined by despondency than by presumption, that they give up because they do not believe things can be better, therefore they live through their lives in humdrum, half-hearted fashion, and by and by die, never having accomplished the thing that they desire."
- Charles A. Blanchard in Getting Things from God page 269

"Faith is not passive. It is stepping out on the promises of God."
- Tony Evans

"I believe in Christianity as I believe in the sun- not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
- C. S. Lewis

"Every man lives by faith, the nonbeliever as well as the saint; the one by faith in natural laws and the other by faith in God."
- A.W. Tozer

"Faith in faith is faith astray."
- A.W. Tozer

"No man is excluded from calling upon God, the gate of salvation is set open unto all men: neither is there any other thing which keepeth us back from entering in, save only our own unbelief."
-John Calvin

"Hope is the oxygen of the soul"
- anonymous

"Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you cannot understand at the time."
- Oswald Chambers

True faith is not a leap into the dark, it's a leap into the light.
- anonymous

"A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool."
- G.K. Chesterson

"That is why daily praying and religious reading and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed."
- C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity book III chapter 11

"Faith is R.I.S.K."
- John Wimber [Attributed to Wimber, though it's not clear he claims to have originated the saying. Most likely it was a popular saying in his theological circles]

"Don’t be afraid to take a big step.You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps."
- David Lloyd George

"Faith is the daring of the soul to go farther than it can see."
- William Newton Clarke

"Feelings come and feelings go,
And feelings are deceiving;
My warrant is the Word of God--
Naught else is worth believing.

Though all my heart should feel condemned
For want of some sweet token,
There is One greater than my heart
Whose Word cannot be broken.

I'll trust in God's unchanging Word
Till soul and body sever,
For, though all things shall pass away,
HIS WORD SHALL STAND FOREVER!"
- attributed to Martin Luther

"Faith is not believing that God can, but that God will."
- Abraham Lincoln

And to the faith that knows it gets what it asks, prayer is not a work or a burden, but a joy and a triumph; it becomes a necessity and a second nature.
-Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer, 31st Lesson

“Each time, before you intercede, be quiet first, and worship God in His glory. Think of what He can do, and how He delights to hear the prayers of His redeemed people. Think of your place and privilege in Christ, and expect great things!”- Andrew Murray 

"Beware in your prayers, above everything else, of limiting God, not only by unbelief, but by fancying that you know what He can do. Expect unexpected things 'above all that we ask or think.' "
-Andrew Murray

"A faith that hasn’t been tested can’t be trusted."
- Adrian Rogers 

"A guilty conscience is one of Satan's great weapons against the children of God: faith can only be bold as the conscience is clean."
- Lilian B. Yeomans

"Faith hears the inaudible, sees the invisible, believes the incredible, and receives the impossible."
- Corrie Ten Boom

"Faith has never yet outstripped the bounty of the Lord."
- Pope Gregory the Great

"We are what we believe we are."
- C.S. Lewis

"Faith is a living deliberate confidence in the grace of God, so certain that for it one could die a thousand deaths, and such confidence and knowledge of divine grace makes us joyous, intrepid, and cheerful towards God and all creation."- Martin Luther
Other versions:
"Faith is a living, daring confidence in God's grace. It is so sure and certain that a man could stake his life on it a thousand times."
"Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favor  that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it."
"Faith is a living and unshakable confidence, a belief in the grace of God so assured that a man would die a thousand deaths for its sake."
- Martin Luther

"[P]rayer may be bold and free. We need not hesitate to imitate the sublime 'cheek' of the child who is not afraid to ask his parents for anything, because he knows he can count completely on their love."- J.I. Packer, Knowing God, chapter 19, p.192

"Faith is a voluntary act of trust in God."
- McCandlish Phillips, The Spirit World p. 184

It is as impossible to separate works from faith as burning and shining from fire.
- Martin Luther from the Preface to his commentary on Romans.

"Not while we are in this life will we move beyond the necessity of living by faith. Therefore, so long as we live, we will be vulnerable to the satanic argument that our only course is to despair, that faith in an unseen God is foolish."
- Dave Breese, His Infernal Majesty p. 81


"The further we get away from our mother's knees, the further do we get away from the true art of praying. All our after-schooling and our after-teachers unteach us the lessons of prayer. Men prayed well in Old Testament times because they were simple men and lived in simple times. They were childlike, lived in childlike times and had childlike faith."
- E.M. Bounds in Prayer and Praying Men

Let a man go to the grammar school of faith and repentance before he goes to the university of election and predestination.
-George Whitefield quoting John Bradford

"Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence."
- Helen Keller

"If we would pray aright, the first thing we should do is to see to it that we really get an audience with God, that we really get into His very presence. Before a word of petition is offered, we should have the definite consciousness that we are talking to God, and should believe that He is listening and is going to grant the thing that we ask of Him."
-Dr. R.A. Torrey

"Faith takes God without any ifs. If God says anything, faith says, "I believe it"; faith says, "Amen" to it."
– D. L. Moody

"Real faith rejoices in the promise of God as if it saw the deliverance and was enjoying it."
– F. F. Bosworth

"Faith’s role is to grasp that which appears impossible or strange to human eyes."
– Andrew Murray

"Faith can only operate where the will of God is known."
– Keith Butler

"Faith is more than agreeing with God’s Word – faith is acting upon that Word."
- Col Stringer

"Unbelief [in God] was the first sin, and pride was the first-born of it."
-Stephen Charnock

"Faith is an action, based on a belief, supported by confidence."
- R. W. Shambach

"Believe that when you come into the presence of God you can have all you came for. You can take it away, and you can use it, for all the power of God is at your disposal in response to your faith."
- Smith Wigglesworth

"His favorite and almost his only subject was faith. No matter what the text, we all knew where he would arrive."
- Donald Gee about his friend Smith Wigglesworth

"There is not a thing that isn’t opportunity to the man of faith."
- Smith Wigglesworth

"No wavering. This is the principle: He who believes is definite. A definite faith brings a definite experience and a definite utterance."
- Smith Wigglesworth

"Faith is not the price that buys God’s blessing, it is the hand that receives His blessing. The price was paid for us by Jesus Christ on the cross"
– Joyce Meyer

"Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so."
- David Brooks

"The important thing is not the size of your faith – it is the One behind your faith – God Himself."
- Oral Roberts

"Faith is the spark that ignites the impossible and causes it to become possible. When a person's faith is activated, it sets in motion supernatural power that enables that person to do what he normally would never be able to do!"
- Rick Renner

"Is there any reason why you should not have faith in God? Has God ever broken one of His promises? I defy any infidel or unbeliever to place a finger on a single promise of God ever made and failed to fulfill."
- D. L. Moody

"Faith is the hand with which we take from God. When we have met all the conditions and taken what God is offering us, we must believe that we have that thing."
- C. Nuzum

"I believe that there is nothing impossible with God and that He is still God Almighty.  And always remember, no matter what those problems are today, as long as God is still on His Throne hearing and answering prayer, everything will come out all right."
- Kathryn Kuhlman

"I don't respect people who don't proselytize. I don't respect that at all. If you believe that there's a heaven and hell and people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life or whatever, and you think that it's not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward.... How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?"
- atheist Penn Jillette

"Lastly: In what a melancholy condition are those who do not believe there is any providence; or, which comes to exactly the same point, not a particular one! Whatever station they are in, as long as they are in the world, they are exposed to numberless dangers which no human wisdom can foresee, and no human power can resist. And there is no help! If they trust in men, they find them "deceitful upon the weights." In many cases they cannot help; in others, they will not. But were they ever so willing, they will die:"
- John Wesley sermon 67 On Divine Providence

"I believe in the infallible book, in the last analysis, because 'of the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the word in my heart.' "- Cornelius Van Til


No human being can explain in the sense of seeing through all things, but only he who believes in God has the right to hold that there is an explanation at all."
- Cornelius Van Til


I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else."
- Cornelius Van Til

"The reason that marriage is so painful and yet wonderful is because it is a reflection of the Gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. The Gospel is—we are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared to believe, and at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope."- Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller in their book The Meaning of Marriage"

You know however that our duties by no means depend on our hopes of success, but that it behooves us to accomplish what God requires of us, even when we are in the greatest despair respecting the results."
- John Calvin, letter to Philip Melanchthon, March 5, 1555 (Jules Bonnet, ed., Letters of John Calvin, vol. 6, p. 158).

"To sustain the belief that there is no God, atheism has to demonstrate infinite knowledge, which is tantamount to saying, "I have infinite knowledge that there is no being in existence with infinite knowledge"
-Ravi Zacharias

I would rather believe for something great and receive half of it, than to believe for nothing and receive all of it!
– Joel Osteen

"I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar."
- atheist Friedrich Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols

Purpose gives birth to hope and instills the passion to act.
– Myles Munroe

"You get faith by studying the Word. Study that Word until something in you "knows that you know" and that you do not just hope that you know."
- Carrie Judd Montgomery

"As prayer without faith is but a beating of the air, so trust without prayer [is] but a presumptuous bravado. He that promises to give, and bids us trust his promises, commands us to pray, and expects obedience to his commands. He will give, but not without our asking."
- puritan Thomas Lye in "How Are We to Live by Faith on Divine Providence?" Taken from Trusting God: Even When Lift Hurts by Jerry Bridges page 108 which itself takes it from Puritan Sermons 1659-1689, Vol.1 p.374

"Trust...[uses] such means as God prescribes for the bringing about his appointed end...God's means are to be used, as well as God's blessing to be expected."
-Thomas Lye

"Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe."
-Augustine

"Faith is the bird that sings while it is yet dark."
-Max Lucado

By faith alone can we become righteous, for faith invests us with the sinlessness of Christ. The more fully we believe this, the fuller will be our joy. If you believe that sin, death, and the curse are void, why, they are null, zero. Whenever sin and death make you nervous, write it down as an illusion of the devil. There is no sin now, no curse, no death, no devil because Christ has done away with them. This fact is sure. There is nothing wrong with the fact. The defect lies in our lack of faith.
- Martin Luther

By faith only therefore we are made righteous, for faith layeth hold upon this innocency and this victory of  Christ. Look then how much thou believest this, so much thou dost enjoy it.
- Martin Luther, A Commentary on Saint Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, printed 1832 edition, p.219, translated by Erasmus Middleton

It is the office of faith to believe what we do not see, and it shall be the reward of faith to see what we do believe.
-Thomas Adams

Where reason cannot wade there faith may swim.
-Thomas Watson

It is the nature of faith to believe God upon His bare word...It will not be, saith sense; it cannot be, saith reason; it both can and will be, saith faith, for I have a promise for it.
-John Trapp

More quotes will be added periodically.

The Presuppositions of Science

Belief in God is Properly Basic

See Steve Hays' blogpost:

"Faith is believing what you know ain't so"

See also my blogpost:

Various Definitions of the Word "Faith"

Faith According to C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity

The following excerpt is from C.S. Lewis' classic book Mere Christianity book 3, chapters 11 and 12.

C.S. Lewis understands that the word "faith" is used in Scripture and theology in different senses. The following definition is one of many legitimate senses and types. I've outlined some other definitions in another of my blogposts. Lewis' definition here could fall under #15 in my list. I've emphasized some passages by coloring the text in red and sometimes placing them in bold as well.


11. Faith

I must talk in this chapter about what the Christians call Faith. Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply Belief—accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people—at least it used to puzzle me—is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue, I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue—what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.

Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then— and a good many people do not see still—was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other. When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted; but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, "Perhaps she'll be different this time," and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his hand and leaves him unsupported in the water—or whether he will suddenly cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down.

Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments where a mere mood rises up against it.

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods "where they get off," you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

The first step is to recognise the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and church going are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

Now I must turn to Faith in the second or higher sense: and this is the most difficult thing I have tackled yet. I want to approach it by going back to the subject of Humility. You may remember I said that the first step towards humility was to realise that one is proud. I want to add now that the next step is to make some serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues. A week is not enough. Things often go swimmingly for the first week. Try six weeks. By that time, having, as far as one can see, fallen back completely or even fallen lower than the point one began from, one will have discovered some truths about oneself. No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist. Very well, then. The main thing we learn from a serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues is that we fail. If there was any idea that God had set us a sort of exam, and that we might get good marks by deserving them, that has to be wiped out. If there was any idea of a sort of bargain—any idea that we could perform our side of the contract and thus put God in our debts so that it was up to Him, in mere justice, to perform His side—that has to be wiped out.

I think every one who has some vague belief in God, until he becomes a Christian, has the idea of an exam, or of a bargain in his mind. The first result of real Christianity is to blow that idea into bits. When they find it blown into bits, some people think this means that Christianity is a failure and give up. They seem to imagine that God is very simple-minded! In fact, of course, He knows all about this. One of the very things Christianity was designed to do was to blow this idea to bits. God has been waiting for the moment at which you discover that there is no question of earning a pass mark in this exam, or putting Him in your debt.

Then comes another discovery. Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child going to its father and saying, "Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present." Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child's present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction. When a man has made these two discoveries God can really get to work. It is after this that real life begins. The man is awake now. We can now go on to talk of Faith in the second sense.

12. Faith

I want to start by saying something that I would like everyone to notice carefully. It is this. If this chapter means nothing to you, if it seems to be trying to answer questions you never asked, drop it at once. Do not bother about it at all. There are certain things in Christianity that can be understood from the outside, before you have become a Christian. But there are a great many things that cannot be understood until after you have gone a certain distance along the Christian road. These things are purely practical, though they do not look as if they were. They are directions for dealing with particular cross-roads and obstacles on the journey and they do not make sense until a man has reached those places. Whenever you find any statement in Christian writings which you can make nothing of, do not worry. Leave it alone. There will come a day, perhaps years later, when you suddenly see what it meant If one could understand it now, it would only do one harm.

Of course all this tells against me as much as anyone else. The thing I am going to try to explain in this chapter may be ahead of me. I may be thinking I have got there when I have not. I can only ask instructed Christians to watch very carefully, and tell me when I go wrong; and others to take what I say with a grain of salt— as something offered, because it may be a help, not because I am certain that I am right.

I am trying to talk about Faith in the second sense, the higher sense. I said last week that the question of Faith in this sense arises after a man has tried his level best to practise the Christian virtues, and found that he fails, and seen that even if he could he would only be giving back to God what was already God's own. In other words, he discovers his bankruptcy. Now, once again, what God cares about is not exactly our actions. What he cares about is that we should be creatures of a certain kind or quality— the kind of creatures He intended us to be—creatures related to Himself in a certain way. I do not add "and related to one another in a certain way," because that is included: if you are right with Him you will inevitably be right with all your fellow-creatures, just as if all the spokes of a wheel are fitted rightly into the hub and the rim they are bound to be in the right positions to one another. And as long as a man is thinking of God as an examiner who has set him a sort of paper to do, or as the opposite party in a sort of bargain—as long as he is thinking of claims and counterclaims between himself and God—he is not yet in the right relation to Him. He is misunderstanding what he is and what God is. And he cannot get into the right relation until he has discovered the fact of our bankruptcy.

When I say "discovered," I mean really discovered: not simply said it parrot-fashion. Of course, any child, if given a certain kind of religious education, will soon learn to say that we have nothing to offer to God that is not already His own and that we find ourselves failing to offer even that without keeping something back. But I am talking of really discovering this: really finding out by experience that it is true.

Now we cannot, in that sense, discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, "You must do this. I can't." Do not, I implore you, start asking yourselves, "Have I reached that moment?" Do not sit down and start watching your own mind to see if it is coming along. That puts a man quite on the wrong track. When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, "Hullo! I'm growing up." It is often only when he looks back that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what people call "growing up." You can see it even in simple matters. A man who starts anxiously watching to see whether he is going to sleep is very likely to remain wide awake. As well, the thing I am talking of now may not happen to every one in a sudden flash—as it did to St Paul or Bunyan: it may be so gradual that no one could ever point to a particular hour or even a particular year. And what matters is the nature of the change in itself, not how we feel while it is happening. It is the change from being confident about our own efforts to the state in which we despair of doing anything for ourselves and leave it to God.

I know the words "leave it to God" can be misunderstood, but they must stay for the moment. The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that he puts all his trust in Christ: trusts that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His birth to His crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself and, in a sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian language, He will share His "sonship" with us, will make us, like Himself, "Sons of God": in Book IV I shall attempt to analyse the meaning of those words a little further. If you like to put it that way, Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for nothing. In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to reach the point of recognising that all we have done and can do is nothing. What we should have liked would be for God to count our good points and ignore our bad ones. Again, in a sense, you may say that no temptation is ever overcome until we stop trying to overcome it— throw up the sponge. But then you could not "stop trying" in the right way and for the right reason until you had tried your very hardest. And, in yet another sense, handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.

Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary. A serious moral effort is the only thing that will bring you to the point where you throw up the sponge. Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair at that point: and out of that Faith in Him good actions must inevitably come. There are two parodies of the truth which different sets of Christians have, in the past, been accused by other Christians of believing: perhaps they may make the truth clearer. One set were accused of saying, "Good actions are all that matters. The best good action is charity. The best kind of charity is giving money. The best thing to give money to is the Church. So hand us over £10,000 and we will see you through." The answer to that nonsense, of course, would be that good actions done for that motive, done with the idea that Heaven can be bought, would not be good actions at all, but only commercial speculations. The other set were accused of saying, "Faith is all that matters. Consequently, if you have faith, it doesn't matter what you do. Sin away, my lad, and have a good time and Christ will see that it makes no difference in the end." The answer to that nonsense is that, if what you call your "faith" in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of what He says, then it is not Faith at all—not faith or trust in Him, but only intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him.

The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together into one amazing sentence. The first half is, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling"—which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, "For it is God who worketh in you"— which looks as if God did everything and we nothing. I am afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in Christianity. I am puzzled, but I am not surprised. You see, we are now trying to understand, and to separate into water-tight compartments, what exactly God does and what man does when God and man are working together. And, of course, we begin by thinking it is like two men working together, so that you could say, "He did this bit and I did that." But this way of thinking breaks down. God is not like that. He is inside you as well as outside: even if we could understand who did what, I do not think human language could properly express it. In the attempt to express it different Churches say different things. But you will find that even those who insist most strongly on the importance of good actions tell you you need Faith; and even those who insist most strongly on Faith tell you to do good actions. At any rate that is as far as I go.

I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one's eyes can see very far beyond that: lots of people's eyes can see further than mine.

More Quotes on Faith Made By Various People