Francis Schaeffer - God Quotes

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Ignorance is in relationship to content; it is not just a spirit of ignorance. In verse 21 it speaks of "the truth in Jesus." Truth is content, truth has something to do with reason. Truth has something to do with the rational creature that God has made us. The dilemma here in the internal world is not just some sort of grey fog, it is in relationship to content.

Francis Schaeffer
These are the two factors that lead to the destruction of our environment: money and time-or to say it another way, greed and haste. The question is, or seems to be, are we going to have an immediate profit and an immediate saving of time, or are we going to do what we really should do as God's children?

Francis Schaeffer
The Christian should be the person who is alive, whose imagination absolutely boils, which moves, which produces something a bit different from God's world because God made us to be creative.

Francis Schaeffer
We cannot deal with people like human beings, we cannot deal with them on the high level of true humanity, unless we really know their origin-who they are. God tells man who he is. God tells us that He created man in His image. So man is something wonderful.

Francis Schaeffer
The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.

Francis Schaeffer
We must stress that the basis for our faith is neither experience nor emotion but the truth as God has given it in verbalized, prepositional form in the Scripture and which we first of all apprehend with our minds.

Francis Schaeffer
Modern man has no real "value" for the ocean. All he has is the most crass form of egoist, pragmatic value for it. He treats it as a "thing" in the worst possible sense, to exploit it for the "good" of man. The man who believes things are there only by chance cannot give things a real value. But for the Christian the value of a thing is not in itself autonomously, but because God made it.

Francis Schaeffer
Technologically, modern man does everything he can do-he functions on this single boundary principle. Modern man, seeing himself as autonomous, with no personal-infinite God who has spoken, has no adequate universal to supply an adequate second boundary condition; and man being fallen is not only finite, but sinful. Thus man's pragmatically made choices have no reference point beyond human egotism. It is dog eat dog, man eat man, man eat nature.

Francis Schaeffer
Man, made in the image of God, has a purpose - to be in relationship to God, who is there. Man forgets his purpose and thus he forgets who he is and what life means.

Francis Schaeffer
With the Fall all became abnormal. It is not just that the individual is separated from God by his true moral guilt, but each of us is not what God made us to be. Beyond each of us as individuals, human relationships are not what God meant them to be. And beyond that, nature is abnormal - the whole cause-and-effect significant history is now abnormal. To say it another way: there is much in history now which should not be.

Francis Schaeffer
All men bear the image of God. They have value not because they are redeemed, but because they are God's creation in God's image.

Francis Schaeffer
There is no place in God's world where there are no people who will come and share a home as long as it is a real home.

Francis Schaeffer
We have the right to rid our houses of ants; but what we have no right to do is to forget to honor the ant as God made it, out in the place where God made the ant to be. When we meet the ant on the sidewalk, we step over him. He is a creature, like ourselves; not made in the image of God, it is true, but equal with man as far as creation is concerned. The ant and the man are both creatures.

Francis Schaeffer
We must remember throughout our lives that in God's sight there are no little people and no little places. Only one thing is important: to be consecrated persons in God's place for us, at each moment.

Francis Schaeffer
If you want a significant man, with absolutes, morality, and meaning, then you must have what the Bible insists upon - that God will judge men justly, and they will not be able to raise their voices because of the base upon which He judges them.

Francis Schaeffer
I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.

Francis Schaeffer
The ancients were afraid that if they went to the end of the earth they would fall off and be consumed by dragons. But once we understand that Christianity is true to what is there, true to the ultimate environment - the infinite, personal God who is really there - then our minds are freed. We can pursue any question and can be sure that we will not fall off the end of the earth.

Francis Schaeffer
No totalitarian authority nor authoritarian state can tolerate those who have an absolute by which to judge that state and its actions. The Christians had that absolute in God's revelation. Because the Christians had an absolute, universal standard by which to judge not only personal morals but the state, they were counted as enemies of totalitarian Rome and were thrown to the beasts.

Francis Schaeffer
I hesitate to add, but I will, that this is fun. God means Christianity to be fun. There is to be a reality of love and communication in the Christian-to-Christian relationship, individually and corporately, which is completely and truly personal.

Francis Schaeffer
And the purpose of our creation, in which all our subsidiary purposes fit, is to be in a personal relationship to God, in communion with him, in love, by choice, the creature before the Creator.

Francis Schaeffer
Thank God for the reality for which we were created, a moment-by-moment communication with God himself.

Francis Schaeffer
Eve doubted God, and I as a child of God am now to be exactly the opposite: I am to believe him. Eve doubted, and mankind in revolt doubts God. To believe him, not just when I accept Christ as Savior, but every moment, one moment at a time: this is the Christian life, and this is true spirituality.

Francis Schaeffer
A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. An art work can be a doxology in itself.

Francis Schaeffer
God has communicated to man, the infinite to the finite. The One who made man capable of language in the first place has communicated to man in language about both spiritual reality and physical reality, about the nature of God and the nature of man.

Francis Schaeffer
The soul is not more important than the body. God made the whole man and the whole man is important.

Francis Schaeffer
We should not view men with a cynical eye, seeing them only as meaningless products of chance, but, on the other hand, we should not go to the opposite extreme of seeing them romantically. To do either is to fail to understand who men really are—creatures made in the image of God but fallen.

Francis Schaeffer
In God's world the individual counts. Therefore, Christian art should deal with the individual.

Francis Schaeffer
If men act upon the teaching of the Word of God, and as proportionately men live according to the teaching and commands of the Bible, so they have in practice a sufficient psychological base. I will find you a man dealing with psychological problems on the basis of the teaching of the Word of God, even if he never heard the word psychology, or does not know what it means.

Francis Schaeffer
The beginning of men's rebellion against God was, and is, the lack of a thankful heart.

Francis Schaeffer
The command is to love him, not just to think about him, or do things for him. We are not to stop with a proper legal relationship - for example, to think of a man as legally lost, which he is, in the sight of a holy God - without thinking of him as a person. Saying this, we can suddenly see that much evangelism is not only sub-Christian, but subhuman - legalistic and impersonal.

Francis Schaeffer