#depravity

In our natural state we dislike dealing with God alone. Through our natural alienation from God we shrink from Him, and from eternal realities. This cleaves to us more or less, even after our regeneration. Hence it is, that more or less, even as believers, we have the same shrinking from standing with God alone,--from depending upon Him alone,--from looking to Him alone:--and yet this is the very position in which we ought to be, if we wish our faith to be strengthened. The more I am in a position to be tried in faith with reference to my body, my family, my service for the Lord, my business, etc., the more shall I have opportunity of seeing God's help and deliverance. ↗

— George Mueller

#faith #business

True gospel preaching always changes the heart. It either awakens it or hardens it. ↗

— Chan Kilgore

#evangelism #salvation #change

In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt. ↗

— Timothy B. Tyson

#followers #hitler #humanity #impotence #love

The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity—which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are. ↗

— Michel Houellebecq

#innocence #slut #teenage-girls #dreams

Our Christian faith - and correlatively, our account of apologetics - is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth. ↗

— James K.A. Smith

#christianity #enlightenment #rational #reason #sin

If I created a new depravity I would be a priestess, while my imitators would founder, after my reign, in abominable filth...Don't you think that proud men, copying Satan, are more guilty than the Satan of the Bible, who invented pride? Is Satan not respectable because of his unprecedented and divinely inspired sin? ↗

— Rachilde

#pride #priestess #satan #sin #inspirational

The author squares man's depravity with still being made in the image of God with this word picture. A vase that has held beautiful roses though now broken, will nevertheless hold something of the fragrance it once contained. ↗

— A.W. Tozer

#depravity #image-of-god #beauty

A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes - and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent ↗

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#depravity #freedom

Our insight into the need of redemption will largely depend upon our knowledge of the terrible nature of the power that has entered our being. ↗

— Andrew Murray

#sin #nature

Evil things are easy things: for they are natural to our fallen nature. Right things are rare flowers that need cultivation. ↗

— Charles H. Spurgeon

#sin #nature