Are you struggling with your faith? Here are five reassuring and important quotes about having a Christian faith.
1) Larry in Michael Shanks’ Muscle and a Shovel
In Muscle and a Shovel, Larry, Michael’s friend, helps explain that faith is not to be confused with emotion. Faith is an actionable faith, not the type of faith that many denominations teach about blind feelings.
Faith – real faith in God – is to follow His instructions. Faith is demonstrating to God that you believe enough to obey His commands. Obeying God is not a work. It is faith. Faith is the exercise of obedience toward the instructions of God.
– Muscle and a Shovel by Michael Shank (Chapter 15)
2) Elisabeth Elliot
For those who struggle with continual questions such as “Why are we here?”, “What’s the point of it all?”, and “Why can’t I just accept the existence of God easily like other people do?”, then this quote is for you.
Faith does not eliminate questions. But faith knows where to take them.
– Elisabeth Elliot
3) C.S. Lewis
An important reminder we all need sometimes is that if we spend our lives living a Christian lifestyle and it turns out Christianity is not real, then we have lost nothing. On the other hand, if we live our lives faithless and sinfully, then we have everything to lose.
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
– C.S. Lewis
4) C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis talks about struggling with keeping faith. He explains that faith should not be based on moods, for moods will change, but on things your reason has once accepted.
Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experince. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an athiest I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why faith is such as necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off’, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound athiest, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of faith.
– C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity (Chapter 11)
5) C.D. Hulen
If you’re like me, sometimes the entire thought of God and Christianity is overwhelming. Sometimes it is so overwhelming, there is a part of you that wish it wasn’t real. Despite these feelings, these feelings don’t matter, as C.D. Hulen states in the following quote.
Truth does not depend upon you to believe it.
– C.D. Hulen
