Ted Dekker Quotes

He didn't think of the rot as a disease. His mind was sharp, but he'd been swallowed by lies that had long ago persuaded him that this was the way all good men should look and move and feel. Pain was natural. The smell of rotting flesh was more a scent of wholesome humanity than a stench.

She was having some difficulty piecing together exactly why she deserved to be in this place, but she wasn't stupid enough to deny that in the end life was cruel and didn't pay attention to what was fair.

I believe in God because only an idiot can look at the complex balance of nature and believe that has not been designed. Believe it or not, but some people still believe that a watch can make itself out of sand if you just give it enough time. That's what they call evolution. And you wonder why I am cynical. From my point of view you have to be a fool not to be cynical.

I'm a skeptic of religious systems, not of the faith. Someday I will be happy to discuss the difference with you.

Your history is no less important to your survival than your ability to breathe. In the end, you can only determine whether to saturate your memories with pain or with perspective. Forgetting is not an option. I tell you the truth now: Pain was not God's plan for this life. It is a reality, but it is not a part of the plan.

... It's not that you don't have the capacity to accept the truth. You don't want to accept it, and you hide behind your own logic and intelligence while the truth marches by. Step out and join it, for goodness' sake! Shout it out in full step! I believe!

So where does Stan fit in this equation? ...
We are told to meditate on scripture, even the hald that details the consequences of evil, the consequent of Jericho and all. Not to pretend out God has somehow changed since the time of Christ. Obviously, Paul's idea of admirable and noble is quite different from ours. God forgives us, Bill. We have mocked His victory by whitewashing the enemy for the sake of our neighbirs approval.
No Greater Love has any man ...

God is obviouslt God, and Heaven obviously exsists, and every word spoken here on earth turns heads up there.

There's a reason we are drawn to the light. A reason why we fear darkness. It's important to be terrified and unnerved about certain things. That way we will choose another path. The path that leads us to truth and love.

If enslaved to the desire for wealth, let this go. If enslaved by grievance, turn the cheek. If your significance is in being mother or father or wife or husband or child or in having any of these - indeed, if you cling even to your own life - these too let go. Have instead a new mind set upon the kingdom. Do not be anxious, but rather repent - see beyond your old mind, you see? Only have eyes to see what is true beyond what you think. Trust the Father. Then you will master this world with pleasure rather than be mastered by it. Then you will find the power to command any storm.

It is critical that writers who embrace the light of Christ's redemptive love characterize the darkness arrayed against us in a way that is consistent with its true nature.

Never mistake a woman as an opportunity for bliss.

Among a rising tide of millions of Christians, how we label ourselves isn't nearly as important as how we actually experience and demonstrate Yeshua's incredible power in and as us, beginning with the power to love our enemies. To us, this is what it means to know God and the One He sent. Words only reflect an intellectual dogma, but the expression of our lives shows our true dogma, which matters far more.

Adrenaline dulls reason; panic kills it.

If you could find a way to peel back the skin of this world so to speak, would you really see this supernatural reality that is greater? Is it true that we fight not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers? Every young person wants to know.

She suddenly began to jump up and down, screaming at the top of her lungs. "The arks are after me! The arks are after me! Help me, the arks are after me!"
...
"The arks! You don't understand, I have the ring and the arks are after me!"
...
(and so the police officer is puzzled long enough for Miriam and Seth to escape)

Women stood along the

That's it?" Jason asked. "You spent an hour talking about how lucky you were to be dying?"
No, not dying, Son. Living.

My idea for 'BoneMan's Daughters' came from the loss of my own daughter when she left home to live with a monster at age 18. I wanted to throttle the man, but she was in love, so all I could do was hope, pray and cry.

He plunged beneath the surface and knew that these were Elyon's waters, and his lake had no bottom.

DUMAH "Love your enemies and do what is wonderful to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you and pray over those who take you away by force." Yeshua

The world didn't like to look at the dark underside very often. But that didn't change the ugliness; it only ensured that those who perpetuated the ugliness were left alone to kill and maim and rape.

Everyone wanted to create his own history. There was nothing as powerful as the written word; history had taught them all that much.

The light had simply and utterly destroyed the darkness.

The four rules of writing ... 1. Write to discover. 2. There is no greater discovery than love. 3. All love comes from the Creator. 4. Write what you will.

You are not your mind. You are not your body. You are not even your beliefs-these are only of this world, mere flesh and blood and a few electrochemical reactions. You, my friend, are far greater than this. Be still and know, not with your mind, but with that which is beyond your mind. Are these words true to you?

Will you follow me, Darsal? Will you Silvie? Will you both follow me to hell and back because two fuzzy white bats told me you should?

What was once obvious to them was no longer quite as obvious. Why was it that humans lost sight of truth so quickly?

Everything I've written up to this point is crap. Now I'm going to write the real one

Once born into childlike faith, brimming with belief, typical people begin to lose their faith. Society mocks them. Their friends smirk. They come to change the world, but over time the world changes them. Soon they forget who they were; they forget the faith they once had. Then one day someone tells them the truth, but they don't want to go back, because they're comfortable in their new skin. Being a stranger in this world is never easy.

Turn to the light. Don't fear the shadow it creates.

My son was singing to us of our Father! Of Yeshua ... Of himself, the truest part of him, and of me, the me that was now risen and complete, joined in Yeshua's identity, like water in a bowl and the bowl in the water at once. He was the Way. The Truth. Life. No one could know the Father without this joining. And the song said more, all at once, like the opening of eyes to see an entire landscape once darkened by blindness. The mystery Talya sang to me in that single note could fill a hundred scrolls. I stood high in that arena and I trembled with wonder. TALYA

I'm here to say that you can't make the troubled waters of life go away by defending yourself against them. You can only walk over those troubled waters if you offer peace to them and leave the safety of your boat.

To Christy it all sounded and smelled exquisitely beautiful, like tiny bits of heaven sprinkled through the halls for their enjoyment. But none of it compared to the overwhelming surge of wonder that met her as she pushed through the doors at Austin's side. The first thing she saw was the sky - a brilliant gray so rich in hue and laced with such wispy strands of white that she gasped. She knew that anyone else might see the same sky and frown, but to her it was a staggering canvas, majestically painted just so. They

People tend to react to other people in wholesale rather than in detail, right? He's a minister, so I hate him. She's beautiful, so I like her. One month later you wake up and realize you have nothing in common with the woman.

To know. Not to know about.

When did speaking your beliefs become synonymous with forcing them upon others?

How can there be love without a true choice? Would you suggest that man be stripped of the capacity to love?

And yet when you get right down to it, we're all the same - rich, poor, old, young, fat, skinny, white, brown, or purple - pick your costume, none of it really matters too much. What does matter is whether or not we take offense when we think we've been wronged, regardless of who we think we are or what costume we're wearing.

My name is Gerhard Braun, and I am God.

And why does man get angry? Because he feels threatened or wronged. And why does he feel threatened? Because he does not believe he is safe. Why? Because he is afraid of God and so cannot trust him.

I've always wanted to go to the desert. It's so vast. Uncaring of the rest of the world. It's just there, no matter what else happens. Golden sands and towering rocks. Coyotes that roam the land, free.

But the more I succeeded in the world's eyes, the more I realized that that success itself was only another prison, fashioned by the values of this world. More wealth only demanded I maintain that wealth. More status only begged me to rise higher. And fame ... What a cruel and jealous mistress fame is.

We're far more than just physical beings having a spiritual experience. We're spiritual beings having a temporary physical experience.

Kmart special over here--one bad man with a stocking over his head, holding up a night crawler with a wallet. Give me your gun, buster.

I believed all the right things about God, but could I really let go of everything and trust Him in all things? If so, I would not experience fear. There is no fear in love and God is love.

For me, writing is an experience. It's an exercise in which I want to discover myself by taking my characters to the edges of human experience, to the edges of themselves and then, asking certain questions - about love, what does it mean to love? What's beauty? What is true beauty? What does it mean to be insane - crazy?

The good news is that even though we walk through this valley of death, we don't have to fear, at least not for ourselves! Unfortunately, there is no way to skip over the valley altogether, we must face death and the evidence of evil all around us. But there will come a day ... And what a day that will be!

It's critical that we use a very dark brush to paint evil. When you bring the light into that darkness as characterized in John 1, that light is very vivid. When it dispels the darkness, we see the brilliance that's there.

I think everything we do, on one level or another, as writers, most of our writing is informed by our world view.

How can you hope to recognize good and evil for what they truly are if you have no belief in a moral authority greater than yourself?

Most people die twice: first when they give up on life, and finally when Death comes to take what's his.

And then ...
And then Thomas Hunter dreamed, and the world would never be the same.

Most believers struggle to really believe in the supernatural as a meaningful, deterministic reality except during moments when they are drawn to it, perhaps during a worship service or while reading a novel like 'Adam.' Being drawn to this truth is the first step to living a life in accordance to this truth.

Grow up? Get herself straightened out? Her mind reeled from the verbal battering. No matter what she did, her father would tell her she was wrong. Worthless. Undeserving.

The day is brimming with freedom. He took another draw of the air. There's nothing like the clean smell of freedom, wouldn't you say Eden?

It seems as though we Christians have developed a nasty habit of leading people into a radical encounter with God's unconditional love, forgiveness, acceptance, and union only to spend the ensuing years teaching them how to become close to God to earn his approval.

Just because the truth disturbs someone doesn't make speaking that truth hate speech.

I now embrace the pleasures of this life with as much or more passion as I did before, but I do so without expecting those pleasures to provide any more than a foretaste of what is to come - a tremendously liberating knowledge.

You never read Spider-Man? Accepting your true identity means understanding that you are a stranger to this world. A freak, ostracized by the very people you want to help.

This is a labyrinth of wickedness and destruction and pleasure and, above all, love, because in the end it's all just one big, mind-bending love story, isn't it?

The problem with any philosophical consideration is that once you open a door in your mind, you can never close it. Once you learn something, you can never convince your mind that you didn't learn it. If you learn the world is round, you can never fit in with a world that thinks it's flat.

It was there, beyond the skin of this world, that a cure of ugliness could be found.

Let go of your right to take offense at all that ever threatened you and all that threatens you still. Release the fear your understanding shows you in this storm. Turn even the other cheek.

Love? You have no understanding that to love is to give, not to take.

All my books are very spiritual. I started out writing what was most natural to me, many years ago, which is religious, because I grew up in the jungle, the son of missionaries. I want to know, is God real? What's a priest's role?

There's always risk in life's most rewarding pursuits, isn't there?

It's the sorrow you feel that allows you to crave love. Without the suffering, there would be no true pleasure. Without tears, no joy. Without deficiency, no longing. This is the secret of the human heart, Rom.

And does man simply choose evil, or does he create it?

I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.

It's rude to run off a guest.
It's rude to wear out your welcome.

He read reports, examined evidence, and poured more reports up the chain than the Pentagon could read. Nothing short of a human sieve. But in the end he was just one small piece on this game board called war. End of story

What we see may deceive us - the skin may be deceptive - but there has to be one truth, right? It can't all just be a jumble of perceptions. So what really exists out there, beyond what we can see? We're so dependent on the surfaces of what we see. But if we could see past the skin of this world ...

My research for 'Adam' affected me profoundly, particularly the research into evil's underbelly. We tend not to think about evil until it pokes its head out of the air about us and then it tends to scare us silly. As well it should.

I think a woman is born with the desire to hear she is beautiful.

Valerik spit to one side. "We laugh at religion's brand of love, forms and rules that keep the poor feeding from the church's coffers. It is in deed."
"I agree. That kind of love is porcelain-coated balls of dung.
But what of true affection? ...

In the same way, we who are clothed in Christ have great power and none greater than to love - without which, to quote Paul, the rest is nothing. But only in surrendering the old business suit do we see who we really are.

In living we die, in dying we live.

Thrillers provide the reader with a safe escape into a dangerous world where the stakes are as high as can be imagined with unpredictable outcomes. It's a perfect genre in which to explore hard issues of good and evil, a mirror that allows the reader to see both the good and not so good in themselves.

The kingdom of God is not about what we see with these eyes. It's not about eating or drinking or walking or throwing away the crutches. Those can be good gifts, like wealth and prosperity. But they touch only the surface and they are quite incidental. His kingdom is about peace and joy and love and a kind of power that will turn your heart into a herd of thundering horses if you let it. It

So then, we are all equally guilty, every day. How, then, does one find and know peace and power in this life when surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses who only pretend to be clean by whitewashing their reputations while pointing fingers of judgment?

What love can you possibly need from the world if you are already full of His? None.

The point is, we were created to love beauty. We love beauty because Elyon loves beauty. We love song because Elyon loves song. We love love because Elyon loves love. And we love to be loved because Elyon loves to be loved. In all these ways we are like Elyon. In one way or another, everything we do is tied to this unfolding story of love between us and Elyon.

- It's their way. They don't understand suffering like we do. They live with it every day.
- It's not their way. It's the way of Teeleh.

But aren't lovers always tempted to find another? You humans are lovers, yes? So you have this awful tendency to reject him who first loved you and follow after the intoxicating scents.

He started to chuckle with delight even before his voice trailed off. The laughter bubbled up and spilled out of his mouth, and even in the middle of all the light he thought that laughter was wonderful too. What an incredible body I have that can laugh like this! So he threw his arms in the air, eyes still closed and full of light, and started to jump up and down, giggling. What a wonderful, wonderful body he had! And

Do you know what hope and fear have in common? ... They both hold great power. But that power is dependent on both fear and hope together. Think about it. Without the fear of something terrible, you cannot have the hope that it won't happen, you see? Without having hope for something wonderful, you can't have any fear of losing it. They work together, the two most powerful forces we possess.

He felt like he was looking at a whole new world. Not only was he a new person, drowned in magic, but the thousands he faced were different. The disease hung on them like dried dung.

They were truly new people. No longer Forest People, certainly not the Horde. They were outcasts. They were the chosen. Those who had died. Those who lived.

Always remember you have been given the power to forgive any offense, and in so doing, remove it from your awareness as far as the east is from the west. True Vision is his gift, allowing you to see no blame; forgiveness is your truest purpose in the life. Seventy times seven, always leaving the old self in a watery grave and rising to find no fault. That's grace, that's true baptism and that's good news ...

Make sure your soul is attached at all times - this town will steal it in a second, given the chance.

Knowing you're worthless doesn't give you value any more than knowing you are a captive sets you free.

If readers, young and old, would take even a moment to reflect on our rapidly shifting culture and ideology, I would be happy. Many leaders of the older generation dismiss emerging culture. Those leaders are at risk of becoming a feeble voice-piece without followers. Most of the younger generation is going deaf to the truth.

Perfect, that's our plan then. But you'll have to give up being a priest first. I wouldn't want to just sit around whispering and sipping hot chocolate.

We all get to discover who we really are at some point, and when we do, it can be quite unsettling.

Wage war on death. Live for love.

Come hither, my dear. Come hither, that I mightest protectest thou!

My journey is so similar to everyone else's journey, because we all are human. We all have been defeated by the powers of darkness, and we all find redemption in the light of Christ.

Some would say the Creator is a lamb. Some would say he's a lion. Some would say both. The fact is, he is neither a lamb nor a lion. These are fiction. Metaphors. Yet the Creator is both a lamb and a lion. These are both truths.

The good news is, you can love yourself because you, too, are now love. Everything else is of your own making: a lie you believe; a story from an accuser that ravages you and keeps you locked in that cage of hell.