Charles Colson Quotes

The church does not draw people in; it sends them out.

I meet millions who tell me that they feel demoralized by the decay around us. The hope that each of us has is not in who governs us, or what laws are passed... Our hope is in the power of God working in the hearts of people.

The church has been brought into the same value system as the world: fame, success, materialism and celebrity. We watch the leading churches and the leading Christians for our cues. We want to emulate the best known preachers with the biggest sanctuaries and the grandest edifices. Preoccupation with these values has perverted the church's message.

True tolerance is not a total lack of judgment. It's knowing what should be tolerated, and refusing to tolerate that which shouldn't.

Many people are trying to remove religion from public life. Under the banner of pluralism, cultural and political leaders are seeking to push all talk about God out of the public arena.

I do not believe one can experience conversion or the fullness of the Christian life apart from the church.

What is true has never been a question to be decided by polls or popular opinion. Truth isn’t ‘democratic’—it’s something that God has written into the very fabric of nature.

Life is a mess. And theology must be lived out in the midst of that mess.

... a widespread secularization increasingly descends into a moral, intellectual, and spiritual nihilism that denies not only the One who is the Truth but the very idea of truth itself.

Wilberforce and the band of abolitionists knew that a private faith that did not act in the face of oppression was no faith at all.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

In our day, you can mock religion in public and even get funds for doing it. But you can't show respect for religion in public - or you risk being hauled into court.

The church's job is to equip the saints for works of service in the world.

No, you can take it from an expert in cover-ups-I've lived through Watergate-that nothing less than a resurrected Christ could have caused those men to maintain to their dying whispers that Jesus is alive and is Lord. Two thousand years later, nothing less than the power of the risen Christ could inspire Christians around the world to remain faithful-despite prison, torture, and death.

I was deepening my understanding of what we call the cultural commission, the command to take dominion and bring righteousness to our culture.

We must be the same person in private and in public. Only the Christian worldview gives us the basis for this kind of integrity.

Remain at your post and do your duty - for the glory of God and His kingdom.

God doesn't want our success; He wants us. He doesn't demand our achievements; He demands our obedience.

People who cannot restrain their own baser instincts, who cannot treat one another with civility, are not capable of self-government... without virtue, a society can be ruled only by fear, a truth that tyrants understand all too well

You are called not to be successful or to meet any of the other counterfeit standards of this world, but to be faithful and to be expended in the cause of serving the risen and returning Christ.

I'd walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon.

Where is the hope? I meet millions who tell me that they feel demoralized by the decay around us. Where is the hope? The hope that each of us have is not in who governs us, or what laws are passed, or what great things that we do as a nation. Our hope is in the power of God working through the hearts of people, and that’s where our hope is in this country; that’s where our hope is in life.

Some labeled Jerry Falwell an American version of the Ayatollah Khomeni. People for the American Way, a group organized to counter the Moral Majority, launched a slick media campaign attaching the Nazi slur to the religious right.

Christians need to take the lead in educating people that children are gifts, as my autistic grandson most surely is. By going down the path we're currently on, we might one day get rid of genetic diseases, but only at the cost of our own humanity.

What we do flows from who we are.

It would take a God with equal measures of truth, love, and justice to [give us a metanarrative]. Since I had abandoned that faith in God and considered myself secular, that wasn't a real option for me.

Judeo-Christian revelation is not the negative influence secularists proclaim it to be. Rather, it is the taproot of our civilization.

Who speaks for God? He does quite nicely for Himself. Through His holy and infallible Word - and the quiet obedience of His servants.

One of the most wonderful things about being a Christian is that I don't ever get up in the morning and wonder if what I do matters. I live every day to the fullest because I can live it through Christ and I know no matter what I do today, I'm going to do something to advance the Kingdom of God.

The true mark of a Christian leader is trying to build up other people. Raise up other leaders!

Some say society must change in order to change people. No, people must be changed in order to change society.

The modernists started with the assumption that science is the only source of sure knowledge, that nature is all there is, and thus that morality is merely a human invention that can be changed to meet changing circumstances in an evolving world.

If the polls are right, our Judeo-Christian heritage is no longer the foundation of our values. We have become a post-Christian society.

The life function of [the local church] is to love the God who created it - to care for others out of obedience to Christ, to heal those who hurt, to take away fear, to restore community, to belong to one another, to proclaim the Good News while living it out. The church is the invisible made visible.

When it comes to the culture, there's no such thing as peaceful coexistence. If we're not defending truth, fighting for Christian values in all of life, the truth will be sacrificed on the altar of mainstream secularism.

Removing religious symbols from public places is not neutrality. On the contrary, it sends a highly negative message - that religion is something shameful, embarrassing, or at best strictly private.

Over the years since I became a Christian, I have always deliberately explained that I have 'accepted Jesus Christ.' These words are invariably translated into 'Colson's professed religious experience.' I discovered that one major U.S. daily, as a matter of policy, will not print the two words Jesus Christ together; when combined, the editor says, it represents an editorial judgment.

Few things are so deadly as a misguided sense of compassion.

The gospel of Jesus Christ must be the bad news of the conviction of sin before it can be the Good News of redemption. The truth is revealed in God's Holy Word; life can be lived only in absolute and disciplined submission to its authority.

We should always pray with as much earnestness as those who expect everything from God; we should always act with as much energy as those who expect everything from themselves.