Quotes about Reception

Theology moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundations and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received.

Influential theologian J. Gresham Machen perhaps said it best: False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the Gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation to be controlled by ideas which prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. (Machen, CC, 7)

He who receives you receives Me, and he who receives Me receives the One who sent Me.

The English public takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.

Then Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Are we not to call Christ ours because we have not made him but only received him? Again, if we are the makers of things that are called ours, then we must have made our eyes, we must have made our hands, we must have made our feet, unless eyes, hands and feet are not to be called ours.

Preaching is one thing—and it is crucial. But hearing is another thing—and it is just as crucial.

Some people have said that man has improved . . . [and] that if Christ came back today, He would not be crucified but would be given a glorious reception. Christ does come to us every day in the form of Bibles that we do not read, in the form of churches that we do not attend, in the form of human need that we pass by. I am convinced that if Christ came back today, He would be crucified more quickly than He was two thousand years ago. Sin never improves. Human nature has not changed.

So Laban invited all the men of that place and prepared a feast.

Surely you have spoken in my hearing, and I have heard these very words:

An aggressive reason that seeks always to grasp on its own terms will never come to know deeper dimensions of reality, including and especially the personal. Such depths can be plumbed only through something like a faith that accepts and receives.

when people know you love and care about them, you can speak difficult truth and they will receive it.