Inspirational Quotes by Lee Strobel
“I think an excellent case can be made for dating the Gospels earlier, but let's go with the more generous estimations. That's still extremely close to the event themselves, especially compared to many other ancient historical writings. Our two best sources on Alexander the Great, for instance, weren't written until at least four hundred years after his life. “As for Caesar Augustus, who is generally regarded as Rome’s greatest emperor, there are five chief sources used by historians to write a history of his adulthood: a very brief funeral inscription, a source written fifty and a hundred years after his death, and three sources written between a hundred and two hundred years after he died. So it’s really remarkable that in the case of Jesus, we have four biographies that even liberals agree were written within thirty-five to sixty-five years after his execution.”
“Is Christ being offensive when he says that he is the only way to God? Judging by the number of people who are offended, you’d better believe it! Is Christ being exclusive? That’s a different question.”
“The idea that Jesus never really died on the cross can be found in the Koran, which was written in the seventh century--in fact, Ahmadiyya Muslims contend that Jesus actually fled to India. To this day there's a shrine that supposedly marks his real burial place in Srinagar, Kashmir.”
― Lee Strobel ,
from The Case for Christ
“Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to; or he cannot and does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, and does not want to, he is wicked. But, if God both can and wants to abolish evil, then how comes evil in the world? Epicurus, philosopher”
“Contrast that with the depiction of Jesus Christ in the gospels. They talk about someone who actually lived several decades earlier, and they name names—crucified under Pontius Pilate, when Caiaphas was the high priest, and the father of Alexander and Rufus carried his cross, for example. That’s concrete historical stuff. It has nothing in common with stories about what supposedly happened ‘once upon a time.”
“Clearing his throat, Craig began. “With all due respect,” he said, “Michael Martin is a philosopher, not a historian, and I don’t think he understands the historian’s craft. For a philosopher, if something is inconsistent, the law of contradiction says, ‘This cannot be true, throw it out!’ However, the historian looks at these narratives and says, ‘I see some inconsistencies, but I notice something about them: they’re all in the secondary details.’ “The core of the story is the same: Joseph of Arimathea takes the body of Jesus, puts it in a tomb, the tomb is visited by a small group of women followers of Jesus early on the Sunday morning following his crucifixion, and they find that the tomb is empty. They see a vision of angels saying that Jesus is risen.”
“The source of evil is not God’s power but mankind’s freedom.”
“That is the joyful task of every follower of Jesus. Someday may it be written about me on my tombstone: He was so amazed by God's grace that he couldn't keep it to himself.”
“He was loving but didn’t let his compassion immobilize him; he didn’t have a bloated ego, even though he was often surrounded by adoring crowds; he maintained balance despite an often demanding lifestyle; he always knew what he was doing and where he was going; he cared deeply about people, including women and children, who weren’t seen as being important back then; he was able to accept people while not merely winking at their sin; he responded to individuals based on where they were at and what they uniquely needed.”
“One of the most obvious lessons was that evidence can be aligned to point in more than one direction. For example, there had easily been enough proof to convict Dixon of shooting the sergeant. But the key questions were these: Had the collection of evidence really been thorough? And which explanation best fit the totality of the facts? Once the pen gun theory was offered, it became clear that this scenario accounted for the full body of evidence in the most optimal way. And there was another lesson. One reason the evidence originally looked so convincing to me was because it fit my preconceptions at the time. To”
“Real love—our love of God and our love of each other—must involve a choice. But with the granting of that choice comes the possibility that people would choose instead to hate.”
“Over the next 1,364 days, the Khmer Rouge, seeking to obliterate the social classes and create an agrarian society of peasants, was responsible for killing, starving, or working to death about two million Cambodians, out of a population of eight million. Accounting for the percentage of people destroyed, Pol Pot’s Communist regime was the most murderous in the modern age.”
“We can never sink so far that God’s grace will not reach us. At the same time, grace does not leave us there. It raises us to new heights.”
“At the time of the crucifixion, the disciples couldn’t see how anything good could result; similarly, as we face struggles and trials and suffering, we sometimes can’t imagine good emerging. But we’ve seen how it did in the case of Jesus, and we can trust it will in our case too. For instance, the greatest Christians in history seem to say that their sufferings ended up bringing them the closest to God—so this is the best thing that could happen, not the worst.”
“The idea that Jesus never really died on the cross can be found in the Qur’an,1 which was written in the seventh century—in fact, Ahmadiya Muslims contend that Jesus actually fled to India. To this day there’s a shrine that supposedly marks his real burial place in Srinagar, Kashmir.2”
“In the ancient world the idea of writing dispassionate, objective history merely to chronicle events, with no ideological purpose, was unheard of. Nobody wrote history if there wasn’t a reason to learn from it.” I smiled. “I suppose you could say that makes everything suspect,” I suggested. “Yes, at one level it does,” he replied. “But if we can reconstruct reasonably accurate history from all kinds of other ancient sources, we ought to be able to do that from the gospels, even though they too are ideological.”
“Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more . . . and there is nothing we can do to make God love us less. Philip Yancey1”
“it’s at least possible that God is wise enough to foresee that we need some pain for reasons which we may not understand but which he foresees as being necessary to some eventual good. Therefore, he’s not being evil by allowing that pain to exist.”
“The Stones and the Scriptures; The Scriptures and Archaeology; and The World of the First Christians”
“Hazen thought for a moment, then concluded: “You know, even if all religions were figments of our imagination, I would choose Christianity, because it says you can be assured that you’re right with God. There’s no need for performance anxiety or laboring through lifetime after lifetime. As the Bible says in 1 John 5:13: ‘I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.”
Group of Brands
© 2026 Bibleportal.com All rights reserved.
Atheist-turned-Christian Lee Strobel, the former award-winning legal editor of The Chicago Tribune, is a New York Times best-selling author of nearly twenty books and has been interviewed on numerous national television programs, including ABC's 20/20, Fox News, and CNN.
After a nearly two-year investigation of the evidence for Jesus, Lee received Christ as his forgiver and leader in 1981. He joined the staff of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, IL, in 1987, and later became a teaching pastor there. He joined Saddleback Valley Community Church in Lake Forest, CA, as a teaching pastor in 2000. He left Saddleback's staff in mid-2002 to focus on writing. He is also a contributing editor and columnist for Outreach magazine.
Lee shared the prestigious Charles "Kip" Jordon Christian Book of the Year award in 2005 for a curriculum he co-authored about the movie The Passion of the Christ. He also has won awards for his books The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith, The Case for a Creator, and Inside the Mind of Unchurched Harry and Mary.