Best 10 quotes of James W. Sire on MyQuotes

A case can certainly be made that Christians bear a major responsibility for our ecological crisis. But the fault is not their biblical but their unbiblical view of nature. Christians have long failed to understand what the Bible really teaches concerning nature and our responsibility for it. For this there is no excuse. Repentance must be our first response. Our second response must then be to right the wrongs of our faulty understanding and act accordingly. We are all responsible to know what can be known of God's will for nature, and we are then responsible to act on that knowledge.

A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundations on which we live and more and have our being.

For is it not the common experience of all of us - you and I - that we do no incorporate the truth of these propositions in our lives? We say we know, but we do not do as we know. We say we believe, but we do not act like it.

Thinking well is integral to acting righteously. Truth and spirituality are of a piece: to know the truth is to do it. There is no dichotomy between the two. To be spiritual is to know/do the truth.

To glorify God is not just to do so in religious worship, singing praise and enacting the traditional rites of the church. To glorify God is to reveal his character by being who we were created to be-the embodiment of the image of God in human form.

Truth cannot be constructed. To live in ideology is, as [Vaclav] Havel so eloquently reminds us, inevitably to live in a lie. Truth can only be revealed. We cannot be creators, only receptors.

When people were conscious of a God whose character was moral law, when their consciences were informed by a sense of rightness, their watchmen would shout halt when they trespassed the law. Now their watchmen are silent. They serve no king and protect no kingdom.

I am most interested in encouraging Christians to think and read well. Christians, of all people, should reflect the mind of their Maker. Learning to read well is a step toward loving God with your mind. It is a leap toward thinking God’s thoughts after Him.

One thing the Bible does not do: it does not denigrate the mind. The Bible is not anti-intellectual. Rather it gives the reason why all of us know what we know, why we can think with some degree of accuracy, and why we fail to think with complete accuracy.

Truth cannot be constructed. To live in ideology is, as Havel so eloquently reminds us, inevitably to live in a lie. Truth can only be revealed. We cannot be creators, only receptors.