Ravi Zacharias' quotes

An opinion is something you possess in a continuum of options, which is merely a preference. It is something you like. It may be a certain color. It may be a type of food. It may be the style of a home.

A conviction is different to an opinion, because that is rooted in your conscience, and you cannot change a conviction without altering that which is essentially you. So while you may hold onto an opinion, a conviction is that which holds onto you.

If a conviction is that which is deeply engraved in your conscience, it is indispensable that it be undergirded with love. If it is not, it makes the possessor of that conviction obnoxious, and the dogma he or she possesses becomes repulsive.

Outside the spirit of God, self-control is not possible beyond a certain point. Concrete is very good for foundation up to a point. It is immense under compressive strength, it can take enormous compressive strength but concrete has no tension strength. So that’s you when you build a foundation, you don’t just build it with concrete, you reinforced it with steel. Because steel’s tensile strength which is 10 times more than concrete and what the concrete cannot do under tension, the steel does it for the concrete under tension. The concrete can take the weight in its compressive strength and the steel provide the tensile strength, that’s why reinforced concrete provides us the double strength we need. The Human will up to a certain point can takes the pressures of this world; you need the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to have self-control. Not just self-control in sensuality but in many other ways.

A man who lives a double life in ministry, is a man who deny in private practice what he affirms in public proclamation. He implicitly denies God’s omniscience. He explicitly challenges the righteousness of God. He gradually ignores the justice of God.

I don’t know what habits you have that you have not given up, I don’t know what dreams you are pursuing that you have not given up, I don’t know what things that your hands touched that are not yours, I don’t know what goals you have set that are ungodly, I don’t know what places your feet taking you that you ought not to go, but I am going to challenge you that if you claim to follow the person of Jesus Christ, are you willing to lay at his altar and give it up for him.

There are those who claim that God is dead and who live like God is dead but there are very few of them. Because everybody at some time, at least assume some absolute exist. They trouble me to a certain degree but there is a greater worry I do have. In the church there are people who claim that God is alive, but turn around and acts as if He were dead. We can preach and study, and sing, and proclaim, and witness and write and still act as if God is dead.

Never be afraid to say no to sin and you will never regret it.

If the objective of evangelism is to touch the conscience, how can we hypocritically reach the conscience? There must be a purity of life.

Nothing you and I can do will be significantly meaningful before God if we neglect our devotional life

And until that answer is learned, the cries of the heart will never find their rest, and God's outstretched hand will not meet ours.

What oxygen is to the brain, Jesus is to our hearts. He satisfies our deepest our deepest longings unlike anything else...If we were to list all of our hungers we have, we might be surprised how many legitimate hungers we have. We hunger for truth, love, knowledge, belonging, self-expression, justice, imagination, learning, and significance - to name a few. If we browse any library, or bookstore, we will soon realize that the vast psychological theories have emerged to describe each one of these hungers or needs. As important and right as those needs are, our need for Jesus is infinitely greater...Jesus put an exclamation point on His supreme place in our life. He who comes to me will never be hungry, and he who believe in me will never be thirsty. (John 6:35)

When your life lacked focus, your death is just as confusing.

If you don't set your boundaries by God's perimeters, whose perimeters would you use?

Life does not only need starting power, it also need staying power.

If we fear the consequences more than we fear the cause, there would be no limits where we will go.

Are you a changed person or a converted person? Is Saul more concerned about his sins or the consequences? I am not sure Saul fear sinning against God more than he fears getting caught by God. Until we understand what sin is, I don’t think we will quit playing with around it. Until we understand how sin can scorch you? How it can break up your home? How it could damage your relationship with your children? How it has broken up nations? How can it has lead to antagonism? How it can be so self-defacing, that people propagates themselves and defaced themselves in the long run? Until we understand the very nature of sin, we don’t understand what it does to the heart of God.

All the moral laws cannot change the heart of men.

The shortest route in life is not always the best route because it can bypass some of the most precious lessons in life.

Is it really possible that God made himself so elusive that you need a doctorate in philosophy to find out whether he exist?

It is more sufficient for us merely to give assent to the content but it must reigned with conviction. There is a frightening trend today to give lip service, but to sever it somehow from deep seeded convictions. Good to know the content, vital to know the content but how important to have that content seed and rooted in conviction.

The world out there looks to the consistency with which you and I live.

There is a hunger out there looking for a life not that doesn't only proclaims but a life that sustains it by consistent Christian conduct.

The world has heard long enough how the blood of Christ saves us from the guilt of sin. The world is also watching us to see if it saves us from the power of sin. How important it is that somewhere your life touch someone else’s life. Not just that they hear, but they see and feel your Christianity within your bones!

Until we understand what the Bible means by sin, our moral definitions will never find solutions.

The problem is not the absence of education or culture, it is the presence of sin.

Those who recognize the nature of sin understand that what renders someone a sinner is not the scale of human wickedness but the very nature and character of God. It is God's purity that we stand before, not a fluctuating moral code that varies from one society to another. [As from the Old Testament to the New Testament] When sin is understood, a moral discussion can begin for each one of us stands accountable before God. An accountability that high makes the moral law of any land secondary to the moral law of God. Honesty and virtue are embraced because our motivation is to honor God and not merely to appear right before others.

Truth has been relegated to subjectivity; beauty has been subjugated to the beholder; and as millions are idiotized night after night, a global commune has been constructed with the arts enjoying a totalitarian rule.

It is easier to hide behind philosophical arguments, heavily footnoted for effect, than it is to admit our hurts, our confusions, our loves, and our passions in the marketplace of life's heartfelt transactions.

Teaching at best beckons us to morality, but it is not in itself efficacious. Teaching is like a mirror. It can show you if your face is dirty, but it the mirror will not wash your face.

The Samaritan woman grasped what He said with fervor that came from an awareness of her real need. The transaction was fascinating. She has come with a bucket. He sent her back with a spring of living water. She had come as a reject. He sent her back being accepted by God Himself. She came wounded. He sent her back whole. She came laden with questions. He sent her back as a source for answers. She came living a life of quiet desperation. She ran back overflowing with hope. The disciples missed it all. It was lunchtime for them.

We do not live so that we can eat, nor do we just eat so that we can live. Life is worth living in and of itself. Life cannot be satisfied when it is lived out as a consuming entity. When it is filled by that which satisfies a hunger that is both physical and spiritual in a mutuality that sustains both without violation of either, only then can life be truly fulfilling.

Truth is not only a matter of offense, in that it makes certain assertions. It is also a matter of defense in that it must be able to make a cogent and sensible response to the counterpoints that are raised.

Every other person who is at the heart of any religion has had his or her beginning either in fancy or in fact. But nevertheless, there is a beginning. Jesus' birth in Bethlehem was a moment preceded by eternity. His being neither originated in time nor came about by the will of humanity. The Author of time, who lived in the eternal, was made incarnate in time that we might live with the eternal in view. In that sense, the message of Christ was not the introduction of a religion, but an introduction to truth about reality as God alone knows it. To deny Jesus' message while pursuing spirituality is to conjure an imaginary religion in an attempt to see heaven while sight is confined to the earth. That is precisely what Jesus challenged when he said, "I have come that [you] may have life" (John 10:10). His life spells living. Your life or my life, apart from Him, spells death.

Historic figures have homes to visit for posterity; the Lord of history left no home. Luminaries leave libraries and write their memoirs; He left one book, penned by ordinary people. Deliverers speak of winning through might and conquest; He spoke of a place in the heart.

Worship is a posture of life that takes as its primary purpose the understanding of what it really means to love and revere God.

I came to Him because I did not know which way to turn. I remained with Him because there is no other way I wish to turn. I came to Him longing for something I did not have. I remain with Him because I have something I will not trade. I came to Him as a stranger. I remain with Him in the most intimate of friendships. I came to Him unsure about the future. I remain with Him certain about my destiny. I came amid the thunderous cries of a culture that has 330 million deities. I remain with Him knowing that truth cannot be all-inclusive.

The four absolutes we all have in our minds: love, justice, evil, and forgiveness.

Faith in the biblical sense is substantive, based on the knowledge that the One in whom that faith is placed has proven that He is worthy of that trust. In its essence, faith is a confidence in the person of Jesus Christ and in His power, so that even when His power does not serve my end, my confidence in Him remains because of who He is.

Capturing the beauty of the conversion of the water into wine, the poet Alexander Pope said, "The conscious water saw its Master and blushed." That sublime description could be reworked to explain each one of these miracles. Was it any different in principle for a broken body to mend at the command of its Maker? Was it far-fetched for the Creator of the universe, who fashioned matter out of nothing, to multiply bread for the crowd? Was it not within the power of the One who called all the molecules into existence to interlock them that they might bear His footsteps?

Changes in language often reflect the changing values of a culture.

With no fact as a referent, what is normative is purely a matter of preference.

There can be no reproach to pain unless we assume human dignity, there is no reason for restraints on pleasure unless we assume human worth, there is no legitimacy to monotony unless we assume a greater purpose to life, there is no purpose to life unless we assume design, death has no significance unless we seek what is everlasting.

There is no greater discovery than seeing God as the author of your destiny.

I think the reason we sometimes have the false sense that God is so far away is because that is where we have put him. We have kept him at a distance, and then when we are in need and call on him in prayer, we wonder where he is. He is exactly where we left him.

Unless I understand the Cross, I cannot understand why my commitment to what is right must be precedence over what I prefer

There is no greater discovery than seeing God as the author of your destiny

I thank the Lord that, even though things were so wrong in my life here, I finally was brought to the realization of what all those struggles were about. There are some wonderful things from your painful past, things with a beauty you may not have realized at the time.

These days its not just that the line between right and wrong has been made unclear, today Christians are being asked by our culture today to erase the lines and move the fences, and if that were not bad enough, we are being asked to join in the celebration cry by those who have thrown off the restraints religion had imposed upon them. It is not just that they ask we accept, but they now demand of us to celebrate it too.

Yes, if truth is not undergirded by love, it makes the possessor of that truth obnoxious and the truth repulsive.

We have a right to believe whatever we want, but not everything we believe is right.

Love is a commitment that will be tested in the most vulnerable areas of spirituality, a commitment that will force you to make some very difficult choices. It is a commitment that demands that you deal with your lust, your greed, your pride, your power, your desire to control, your temper, your patience, and every area of temptation that the Bible clearly talks about. It demands the quality of commitment that Jesus demonstrates in His relationship to us.

When cupidity (selfishness) and self-aggrandizement is the motive, unity can be absolutely devastating.

Nowhere is our escape from reality more visible than in cosmetics industry across this world which try to hide so many things. The cosmetics industry has exploded into a multi billion dollar business, churning out products to make us look better, smell better, or feel younger and a dozen other innocent form of disfigurement. Finally, it is cancer or heart attack that lands us in a coffin. So what do we do? We make a final outlandish effort to slap on enough cream and dip into the mortifican’s cosmetic bag so that everyone passes by in that ultimate death-denying compliment” He looks just like himself, doesn’t he?”

If we find those answers, they will spell life, steadying the soul even though the heart still aches.

The single greatest obstacle to the impact of the gospel has not been its inability to provide answers, but the failure on our part to live it out.

Man is not just unethical, he is lost and dead. If man is only lost in guilt, what I have given you is just bad news but He is lost in sin, our great privilege to tell him we have a savior. The biggest difference between Jesus Christ and ethical & moral teachers who has been deified by man, these moralists came to make bad people good but Jesus Christ came to make dead people live.

Postmodernism tells us there’s no such thing as truth; no such thing as meaning; no such thing as certainty. I remember lecturing at Ohio State University, one of the largest universities in this country. I was minutes away from beginning my lecture, and my host was driving me past a new building called the Wexner Center for the Performing Arts. He said, “This is America’s first postmodern building.” I was startled for a moment and I said, “What is a postmodern building?” He said, “Well, the architect said that he designed this building with no design in mind. When the architect was asked, ‘Why?’ he said, ‘If life itself is capricious, why should our buildings have any design and any meaning?’ So he has pillars that have no purpose. He has stairways that go nowhere. He has a senseless building built and somebody has paid for it.” I said, “So his argument was that if life has no purpose and design, why should the building have any design?” He said, “That is correct.” I said, “Did he do the same with the foundation?” All of a sudden there was silence. You see, you and I can fool with the infrastructure as much as we would like, but we dare not fool with the foundation because it will call our bluff in a hurry.

A man rejects God neither because of intellectual demands nor because of the scarcity of evidence. A man rejects God because of a moral resistance that refuses to admit his need for God.

H. L. Mencken said, 'The problem with life is not that it's a tragedy, but that it's a bore.' A child who is filled with wonder is also filled with a sense of enchantment, a sense of significance, a sense of meaning. When wonder ceases, boredom and emptiness begin to stalk existence.

If you were stranded at the midnight hour in a desolate Los Angeles street and if, as you stepped out of your car with fear and trembling, you were suddenly to hear the weight of pounding footsteps behind you, and you saw ten burly young men who had just stepped out of a dwelling coming toward you, would it or would it not make a difference to you to know that they were coming from a Bible study?

In the East, devotion, commitment, and role relations finds a cultural emphasis. In the West, romance becomes the sum and substance of it all. Somewhere the two must be incorporated for without romance marriage is drudgery, but without will and commitment, marriage is a mockery.

It was not the volume of sin that sent Christ to the cross; it was the fact of sin.

Man is not at peace with his fellow man because he is not at peace with himself. He is not at peace with himself because he is not at peace with God.

Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain; meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure. And that is why we find ourselves emptied of meaning with our pantries still full.

The use or abuse of Christianity in contradiction to the very message of the gospel reveals not the gospel for what it is, but the heart of man. That is why atheism is so bankrupt as a view of life, for it miserably fails to deal with the human condition as it really is.

One of the most staggering truths of the Scriptures is to understand that we do not earn our way to heaven. ...works have a place-but as a demonstration of having received God's forgiveness, not as a badge of merit of having earned it.

To sustain the belief that there is no God, atheism has to demonstrate infinite knowledge. Because their declaration is tantamount to saying, "I have infinite knowledge that there is no being in existence with infinite knowledge.

Time is the brush of God, as he paints his masterpiece on the heart of humanity

We have a right to believe whatever we want, but not everything we believe is right.

What I believe in my heart must make sense in my mind.

Oscar Wilde said, 'The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.' He got it wrong. The unrestrained appeasement of desire only expands hungers. Does not our experience tell us so?

Time isn't just a fleeting thing. It never moves forward without engraving it's mark upon the heart.

You must keep in mind that God does have an appointment with you, that there is a cost to serving Him.

In quoting a friend of his, D.D. Davis, who said: "There are no accidents in life -- just incidents that remind us who is boss."

When God puts a broken life back together, He removes the scars because He builds from the inside out. And when God steadies a faltering life, He puts you on His footing.

Zacharias quotes David Livingston: "Lord, send me anywhere, only go with me. Lay any burden on me, only sustain me. Sever any ties but the ties that bind me to your service and to your heart."

All pleasure costs. For legitimate, you pay the price before; for illegitimate, you pay the price after.

You show me a society without shame, and I will show you a society that is flirting with hell. You cannot, simply cannot, build a culture where nothing is shameful anymore.

What we want is a politician who will understand . . . the framework of the value of human life and the moral framework of the Judeo-Christian world view, which is the only moral framework under which this country could have been framed . . . that we are all created equal, that liberty and justice and all of those terms that I’ve given only make sense within the Judeo-Christian world view. Created? Equal? Naturalism does not tell us we are equal. Naturalism does not tell us we are created. Liberty? Islam does not believe in the total liberty of the individual. Equal? Hinduism believes in the caste system. The Judeo-Christian world view is the only world view that could frame this country. And so I think as we elect, we go before God and see out of the candidates who will be the best one to represent the values and at the same time be a good leader for the country whose first responsibility should be to protect its citizens.

To deem all beliefs equally true is sheer nonsense for the simple reason that to deny that statement would also, then, be true. But if denial of the statement is also true, then all religions are not true.

The loneliest moment in life is when you have just experienced that which you thought would deliver the ultimate, and it has just let you down.

We have become so accustomed to hearing preachers or expositors, as important as that is, that many in the process have abandoned the grand privilege of personally hearing from God’s Word daily.

We have to find the back door to peoples’ hearts because the front door is heavily guarded.

Unity does not have to be uniformity.

Is life to be defined by what I pursue — or must my pursuit be defined by what life was meant to be? If the primary goal of life is a closer walk with GOD — then even the good is sometimes set aside in favor of the best. If a person does not understand that the purpose of life defines lifestyle, then the lifestyle itself is hollow and the life is squandered.

Jesus Christ continually contradicts us in the way we experience ourselves as alive.... and compels us to radically redefine what we mean by life. He encountered us the way we encountered the disciples on Easter Sunday. They were the ones marked out for death. Those who survived were really the dead. He’s the dead one was really the living.

Retreating from the world, many Christians seek cover inside their church buildings, wagging their fingers at the "secular ownership" of the social landscape and receiving petty satisfaction in saying, "This little part still belongs to us.

If you are determined in going in a certain direction, if you are bent upon silencing the voice of God in your life, you know what God will do? He’ll step aside and second your motion. If that’s what you really want. Because He cannot violate your Will and still call you free… If I am a free being, He cannot overrule my freedom in the most ultimate sense, and still call me free. He can lure, He can rule, He can plead, He can beg, He can even put the pressure on, but He cannot violate your will and still call you free.

You will never lighten any load until you feel the pressure in your own soul.

Apart from God, chaos is the norm; with God, the hungers of the mind and heart find their fulfillment.How are you going to reach a generation that hears with their eyes and thinks with their emotions?

Many professing believers end up going their own way but make it look like God's way. Many non-believers are willing to go God's way only if God goes their way.

The risk we flirt with in the Christian world is that worship has become an experience rather than a way of life is a very risky risky proposition. How we keep worship holding its theological integrity and finding its existential relevance? If we do not understand how to retain its integrity and maintain its relevance, we will lose one or two in the process and the church will either become irrelevant or lose the truth in the process.

In fact, Nietzsche went on to say, because God had died in the nineteenth century, there would be two direct results in the twentieth century. First, he prognosticated that the twentieth century would become the bloodiest century in history, and, second, that a universal madness would break out. He has been right on both counts.

Great thinkers have repeatedly warned over the centuries that a departure from God denudes humans and results in the death of meaning. The denial of God and the death of meaning cannot be severed from each other, though interspersed with all the learning, education, and hyperactivity of postmodern human beings. The farther we move from God, the more we devalue man.

Indeed, one author has observed, ‘In the 1950s, kids lost their innocence. They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term - the generation gap. In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was the decade of protest - church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it. In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism, dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self: self-image, self-esteem, self-assertion. It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex but forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference. In the 1980s, kids lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority, and love, and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.’ I would like to add that in the 1990s, we lost our ability to reason. The power of critical thinking has gone from induction to deduction and very few are able to think clearly anymore. I have often said the challenge of the truth speaker today is this: How do you reach a generation that listens with its eyes and thinks with its feelings?

Those who harness the strength of the arts mold the soul of a nation to an extraordinary degree, affecting and changing the way people think and act to drastic proportions. As the Scottish politician Andrew Fletcher (1655-1716) once noted, ‘Give me the making of the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.’ Television and music media are such potent forces because they have within them the capacity to bypass reason and head straight for the imagination. They can bind the strongman of reason, and so capture the goods. Indeed…this is a generation that listens with its eyes and thinks with its feelings. Any system that opens its arms wide enough to incorporate everything will end up strangling itself when the arms close in.

Two main words for Sin in the Bible: the first is the concept of the missing the mark. The second word is one who deliberately steps aside in violation for what he know to be right.

If you are a praying Christian, your Christianity will carry you. If you are not a praying Christian, you will carry your Christianity and it gets exhausting to carry the infinite and it will wear you. If you are a praying Christian, your faith and God will carry you. If you are not a praying Christian, you will get thoroughly, thoroughly , thoroughly exhausted.

For man, sin is not just an act, it is an attitude. Man is not a sinner because he is a trangressor. He is a trangressor because he is already a sinner. The offense is not only in the trangression but in the intention. Not merely in the violation of the law but in the deposition of the heart. The Sermon on the Mount makes this clear, please listen now. Lust is adultery even though it never passes beyond the look of desire , hateful anger is murder even if the blood is never spilled, materialism is lust of the eyes even if one is not rich. This is so because the seed of sin is in the heart and will, not only in the action.