Quotes from Eric Metaxas

But we know that true grace comes to us by costly sacrifice. And if God was willing to go to the cross and endure such pain and absorb such a cost in order to save us, then we must live sacrificially as we serve others. Anyone who truly understands how God's grace comes to us will have a changed life. That's the gospel, not salvation by law, or by cheap grace, but by costly grace. Costly grace changes you from the inside out.

But most extraordinary—and evidence to Mrs. Wilberforce of a "Great Change" indeed, though one she certainly welcomed—was a marked absence of that irritability and harsh temper he had sometimes displayed, especially toward her.

that country where they wouldn't be told what to think or how to live or even whether or how to worship.

God was interested not in success, but in obedience. If one obeyed God and was willing to suffer defeat and whatever else came one's way, God would show a kind of success that the world couldn't imagine. But this was the narrow path, and few would take it.

Christians were free, but he also made it clear that their freedom made them duty-bound to behave well toward others. Christian truth was eleven parts paradox out of ten. This was its essentially mysterious and glorious nature.

They understood that America would not flourish without great help from all Americans.

Jesus's rising from the dead was considered as impossible and staggering as such a thing would be considered today. People in the first century did not rise from the grave any more than they do now, in the twenty-first century.

If we think of the fatherhood of God, we get a picture of someone who is strong and loving and who sacrifices himself for those he loves. That's a picture of real fatherhood and real manhood.

He knew that, if left to do as he liked, he might fritter away the rest of his life, just as he'd frittered away so many years already. He knew that he didn't want to go back to where he had been before, and he would take whatever steps were necessary to ensure that he continued on the new path he was now on.

in his mercy, had allowed Wilberforce to see himself as he truly was, and it was crushing. But Wilberforce knew God didn't mean to end there. On the other side of the worst of who he was, if he dared face that worst, was a God who would help him overcome his faults and do great things, the very things for which he had created him. It was not too late.

One cannot demand "the truth" at any cost, and for this girl to admit in front of the class that her father is a drunkard is to dishonor him. How one tells the truth depends on circumstances.

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism." It was a throwaway comment made in an interview with the New York World-Telegram from his office at Calvary Church on Park Avenue and Twenty-first Street, and it did not reflect his wider thinking on the subject. Still, it illustrates how easily even the most serious Christians were initially taken in by Hitler's conservative pseudo-Christian propaganda.

The First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed. If this is true, how is it possible that all the energy and matter in our universe were created in the Big Bang?

Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic . . . Do not defend God's Word, but testify to it . . . Trust to the Word.

Wilberforce's time at Cambridge over two hundred years ago sounds extraordinarily like the experience of many college students today.

During this period, he did some things that challenge our modern sensibilities.

For the rest of his life he struggled terribly with self-discipline and always attributed this weakness to his wasted and feckless years at Pocklington and Cambridge, where slacking off was encouraged and his superior mind always enabled him to do just what needed to be done, and done brilliantly, at the eleventh hour.

That too seems unnecessarily severe, but we mustn't judge too harshly, for those who have gone through anything like a dramatic conversion usually stagger a bit too far in one direction before they correct their course and learn where the best forward path lies.

But since logic dictates that God could have saved the Israelites from Pharaoh's army in an infinity of ways, and in ways infinitely subtler than parting the Red Sea, it is obvious that he didn't part the Red Sea to save the Israelites as much as he parted the Red Sea to communicate himself to the Israelites.

It is hoped and believed," he famously wrote, "that the Lord has raised you up for the good of His church and for the good of the nation.

Anyone who perseveres in his sin receives judgement. The church cannot loose the penitent from sin without arresting and binding the impenitent in sin.

Wilberforce's decision to remain in politics made the transfer of Christian ideas into the previously "secular" realm of society possible for generations of Christians to follow.

They understood that freedom was not merely the freedom to be left alone; it was the freedom to do what was right.