Inspirational Quotes by Cornelius Plantinga
“God is great and God is good, but God is also elusive and unpredictable,”
“Saints and martyrs are famous for testifying to the truth about Jesus Christ while their enemies set them on fire, but each day ordinary Christians experience small martyrdoms when they blow the whistle on a dangerous product, or lose a friend they had to confront, or stand up in a small group and, for the first time in their lives, say to a group of strangers,"My name is Maxine, and I am an alcoholic."”
“Perhaps the preacher is hoping to acquire from her reading what I call “middle wisdom.” Let’s say that middle wisdom consists of insights into life that are more profound than commonplaces, but less so than great proverbs.”
“We may think we are praising and encouraging the young by predicting great things for them, but the burden of our expectations may shame and crush them.”
“Patience is like good motor oil. It doesn't remove all the contaminants. It just puts them into suspension so they don't get into your works and seize them up. Patient people have, so too speak, a large crankcase. They can put a lot of irritants into suspension.”
topics: Patience
“A humble person is more likely to be self confident... a person with real humility knows how much they are loved.”
“To recall an image of John Calvin, the preacher is someone the church sends to the Bible week by week to dig up part of its treasure and bring it to us in the Sunday sermon. The”
“To place ourselves in range of God's choicest gifts, we have to walk with God, work with God, lean on God, cling to God, come to have the sense and feel of God, refer all things to God.”
topics: Gifts
“Faith in the sheltering wings of God does not remove physical danger or the need for precaution against it. We cannot ignore Beirut tourist advisories, or feed wild animals on our camping trips, or jump a hot motorcycle over a row of parked cars and trust God to keep us safe. We cannot smoke cigarettes like the Marlboro man and then claim the promises of Psalm 91 as our protection against lung cancer. A person who did these things would be a foolish believer and a foolish reader of Psalm 91.”
topics: Faith
“human society,” as C. S. Lewis puts it, “inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection.”
“To speak of sin without grace is to minimize the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the fruit of the Spirit, and the hope of shalom.”
“An envier doesn’t care whether you have earned part of your success or whether some golden parachute from heaven has dropped straight into your lap. To an envier, your advantage is totally unfair either way. In this respect, enviers are theological switch-hitters: sometimes they are Pelagians and sometimes they are Augustinians. But always they are potential killers.”
“Vices have to masquerade as virtues — lust as love, thinly veiled sadism as military discipline, envy as righteous indignation, domestic tyranny as parental concern.”
“The image of pollution suggests bringing together what ought to be kept apart. To pollute soil, air, or water is to blend into them foreign materials — machine oil, for example — so that these natural resources no longer nourish or delight very well. Similarly, the introduction of a third lover into a marriage or an idol into the natural human relation to God adds a foreign agent to them; it corrupts these entities by addition.”
“Sticks and stones can break our bones, but lies can break our hearts and our careers.”
“People tethered to God by faith can let themselves go because they know they will get themselves back.”
“To try deliberately for self-actualization is like trying very hard to fall asleep or to have a good time.”
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Cornelius "Neal" Plantinga, Jr. is the president of Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he is professor of systematic theology. He is a preacher, speaker,and award-winning author.
He was born in Jamestown, ND and was ordained in 1971. He is the brother of philosopher Alvin Plantinga,music historian Leon Plantinga, and former CBS news producer Terry Plantinga. He is the uncle of theologian Amy Plantinga Pauw. Plantinga married Kathleen Talsma in 1967 and has two children with her.