Evangelism Apologetics Quotes

Pastors are appointed by God to help their people see that the church walks in the light and all others in darkness. We, the "in Christ" people, are the true culture (John 14:6). We say this without arrogance, but with a sense of surprise. ~ Owen Strachan

Disciples of Jesus Christ have had a profound life-altering experience. They have encountered a supernatural personality, revealed in history as Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, the Messiah. And they have discovered the meaning and purpose of their lives in the subsequent revelation of his continuing presence to them. The experience demands a faithful, reliable witness.

What would public opinion say of a person who discovered the absolute cure for AIDS, but was unwilling to share that cure with a world that so desperately needs it? What if the antidote were kept hidden and made use of by only the discoverer and his family? We would consider it an moral outrage and he or she would be infamous. Why? We expect the cure to be shared, not only shared, but made available to all as soon as possible! ~ David C. Alves

Whenever you feel like feeling like a devil's advocate, Bible-thump. That, in a worldly world, is the great irony and satire of evangelism. ~ Criss Jami

This combination of the abandonment of evangelism, the divorce between evangelism, apologetics and discipleship, and the failure to appreciate true human diversity is deeply serious. It is probably behind the fact that many Christians, realizing the ineffectiveness of many current approaches and sensing the unpopularity and implausibility of much Christian witness, have simply fallen silent and given up evangelism altogether, sometimes relieved to mask their evasion under a newfound passion for social justice that can forget the gaucheness of evangelism. At best, many of us who take the good news of Jesus seriously are eager and ready to share the good news when we meet people who are open, interested or in need of what we have to share. But we are less effective when we encounter people who are not open, not interested or not needy - in other words, people who are closed, indifferent, hostile, skeptical or apathetic, and therefore require persuasion. ~ Os Guinness

May we be thunder in our doctrine and lighten in out conversations. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

When we find that God's ways always coincide with our own ways, it's time to question who we're really worshipping, God or ourselves. The latter moves the nature of godliness from the King to our servant to a slave, a deduction into the realm of selfhood and then the lower, slavehood. It's a spiritual mathematics in that men who need God in his godhood are humble yet strong and spiritually ambitious while men who need a slave in their selfhood are ultimately paralyzed and will remain paralyzed. ~ Criss Jami

evangelism of children nonetheless seeks to cut off the process of independent thought before it begins. It's this aspect of religious indoctrination that is most unacceptable - the idea that doubt is bad, that unquestioning acceptance is good, that there is only one possible right answer, and that someone else has already figured out what that answer is. ~ Dale McGowan

Lothness to displease men, makes us undo them (394). ~ Richard Baxter

Jesus is God is the unified field theory of Christianity. ~ R. Alan Woods

Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit's power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square, that is, at the heart of Western culture. And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting, all their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension. ~ Alan Hirsch

These conversations went on and on with person after person. I stood literally amazed by the grace of God, not just upon one Christian passionate about sharing the gospel, but upon an entire community passionate about sharing the gospel. As I looked around, I observed a contagious culture of evangelism across the church. It is a culture of evangelism that is not ultimately dependent on events, projects, programs, and ministry professionals. Instead, it is a culture of evangelism that is built on people filled with the power of God's Spirit proclaiming the gospel of God's grace in the context of their everyday lives and relationships. ~ J. Mack Stiles

At the end of the day, the biggest obstacle to evangelism is Christians who don't share the gospel. ~ Albert Mohler

Preaching a man a sermon with a broken head and telling him to be right with God is equal to telling a man with a broken leg to get up and run a race. ~ Richard Baxter

False conversions are a wart on the face of Christian evangelism. ~ Kevin Roose

The typical atheist rebels against God as a teenager rebels against his parents. When his own desires or standards are not fulfilled in the way that he sees fit, he, in revolt, storms out of the house in denial of the Word of God and in scrutiny of a great deal of those who stand by the Word of God. The epithet 'Heavenly Father' is a grand reflection, a relation to that of human nature. ~ Criss Jami

Christian myth, reveals the truth that "the Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed into a hostile world. ~ Philip Zaleski

Moreover, what is true for the history of antisemitism, that it fell into the hands of non-Jewish crackpots and Jewish apologetics, and was carefully avoided by reputable historians, is true, mutatis mutandis, for nearly all elements that later crystallized in the novel totalitarian phenomenon; they had hardly been noticed by either learned or public opinion because they belonged to a subterranean stream of European history where, hidden from the light of the public and the attention of enlightened men, they had been able to gather an entirely unexpected virulence. ~ Hannah Arendt

Global evangelism does not take place in a demilitarized zone but on the battleground of spiritual warfare. Satan, in vengeance and jealousy for that which belongs to God, is deceiving the nations and holding them in bondage to a lie. ~ Ed Stetzer

Conscious minds can, at the most, comprehend that the whole idea of a 'God' is his superiority, his omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience; and therefore, at the least, desire him, someone far greater than themselves. ~ Criss Jami

No clergyman however brilliant, no evangelist no matter how eloquent or compelling, can bring about the revival we need. Only the Holy Spirit can do this. ~ Billy Graham

Prayer is crucial in evangelism: Only God can change the heart of someone who is in rebellion against Him. No matter how logical our arguments or how fervent our appeals, our words will accomplish nothing unless God's Spirit prepares the way. ~ Billy Graham

My plea to the Body of Christ is while we must do all we can to meet the needs of the suffering and dying millions, we must not see these activities as a substitute for evangelism and establishing churches among the unreached. ~ K.P. Yohannan

Religion in art was a subtle business, best handled indirectly. ~ Philip Zaleski

Villagers saw me as a person when I played with them, as opposed to when I talked with them. ~ Rebekah Nathan

A god who gave us everything we wanted would be the most malevolent god of all. With an infantile curiosity, we insist on tasting the cockroach on the floor while our father is preparing a magnificent feast for us. ~ Criss Jami

Jesus Christ is not a cosmic errand boy. I mean no disrespect or irreverence in so saying, but I do intend to convey the idea that while he loves us deeply and dearly, Christ the Lord is not perched on the edge of heaven, anxiously anticipating our next wish. When we speak of God being good to us, we generally mean that he is kind to us. In the words of the inimitable C. S. Lewis, "What would really satisfy us would be a god who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven--a senile benevolence who as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves,' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.'" You know and I know that our Lord is much, much more than that.

One writer observed: "When we so emphasize Christ's benefits that he becomes nothing more than what his significance is 'for me' we are in danger. . . . Evangelism that says 'come on, it's good for you'; discipleship that concentrates on the benefits package; sermons that 'use' Jesus as the means to a better life or marriage or job or attitude--these all turn Jesus into an expression of that nice god who always meets my spiritual needs. And this is why I am increasingly hesitant to speak of Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. As Ken Woodward put it in a 1994 essay, 'Now I think we all need to be ~ Robert L. Millet

Accepting Christ" is only the beginning, not the ultimate goal. Likewise, evangelism is vital, but so is discipleship. To go no deeper is to risk being like the seed that fell not on good soil but on rocky ground, sprouting up but bearing little or no fruit. Focusing solely on God's gift of free salvation is focusing on the minimum. ~ Ann Spangler

Apologetics shouldn't be a prelude to communicating about Jesus. He is our strongest argument. ~ Luke Cawley

The Christian does not avoid sin to achieve salvation, but rather salvation brings him to a desire not to sin. The closer that one's spirit is synchronized with the holy knowledge of God, the more he comprehends how and why sin is destructive to himself and others in each and every circumstance. The dwindling desire for sin is a premature gift of Heaven - where there will be no sin, where all will, too, possess that full and complete wisdom; all will have perfect reasons not to sin. In this way, free will might still exist, but the shared wisdom of God will simply outwit all desires, impulses, and needs to sin. ~ Criss Jami

Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of
which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and
already weary of hearing what he has never heard. ~ G.K. Chesterton

My prophetic task would be twofold: to stand up to him, and to stand by him. To awaken his conscience, and to salve the pain this would cause him. ~ Erik Larson

Know the word of God not in order that by doing so you might be saved; know it rather so that unlike the many you are not easily deceived. You may find that, evidently, a great many of the so-called novel ideas of the present were made without a clue that 'God', if you will, already laid profound discourse on or against them ages ago: no man has gone against God in such a way that God, from the beginning, did not already expect him to. Then, insofar as this, you will remain clear in that it is not at all that the Christian should be against newness; quite the opposite really - for a major point of Christianity is about one constantly being made new in Christ - it is only that many people are not actually bringing true newness to the table, and this is precisely because they do not first apply (or let alone even know) the wisdom of old. ~ Criss Jami

16. Because of this, evangelism cannot be divorced from the preaching and practicing of justice. This is the flaw in the view according to which evangelism is given absolute priority over social involvement, or where evangelism is separated from justice, even if it is maintained that, together with social justice, it constitutes "mission. ~ David J. Bosch

A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures. ~ Philip Zaleski

It would behoove you to have your thesis finely tuned and the logical arguments utilized in support of it tightly woven into a credible, and creatively persuasive tapestry. ~ R. Alan Woods

In the seeker-church movement the emphasis away from the use and explication of creedal confession is obvious, since the whole point is to focus on the 'felt-needs' of the person in the pew - especially the felt-needs of nonbelievers. The rationale is that the church and its main service are evangelistic in nature. Because nonbelievers simply cannot penetrate the arcana of historic Christianity, the felt-needs of people become the point of entry into conversation with them. ~ James Davison Hunter

The sad reality is that there are many Christians who are "saved", "heaven bound," and "hell proofed" who do not care about the souls of the lost. What a beautiful contrast our Lord Jesus Christ is! His passion for souls brought Him from Heaven to earth, His Passion for souls motivated His compassionate activity. His passion for souls pressed Him to a rough cross where He surrendered His life to save the lost. ~ John Willis Zumwalt

Belief in Some One's right to punish you is the fate of all children in Judaic-Christian culture. But nowhere else, perhaps, have the rich seed-beds of Western homes found such a growing climate for guilt as is produced in the South by the combination of a warm moist evangelism and racial segregation. ~ Lillian Smith

We preach sermons, write books on apologetics, conduct city-wide evangelistic campaigns. For those alienated from the church, that approach no longer has the same drawing power. And for the truly needy, words alone don't satisfy; "A hungry person has no ears," as one relief worker told me. A skeptical world judges the truth of what we say by the proof of how we live. ~ Philip Yancey

As Christians we face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task.

If the church loses the intellectual battle in one generation, then evangelism will become immeasurably more difficult in the next. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we must not lose: souls of men and women hang in the balance.

For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.

Thinking about your faith is indeed a virtue, for it helps you to better understand and defend your faith. But thinking about your faith is not equivalent to doubting your faith.

Doubt is never a purely intellectual problem. There is a spiritual dimension to the problem that must be recognized. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in spiritual warfare and there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you.

Reason can be used to defend our faith by formulating arguments for the existence of God or by refuting objections. But though the arguments so developed serve to confirm the truth of our faith, they are not properly the basi ~ William Lane Craig