Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.
D. A. CarsonWhen you are converted, you want to do what you didn't want to do before, and you don't want to do what you wanted to do before. There's a change in the heart; there's a cleaning up, a change in orientation, and holiness becomes attractive, instead of something you have to put up with to figure out what you can get away with. As long as young people are asking, 'Can I get away with this?' or 'Can I get away with that?' I wonder if they're regenerate. If they're asking, instead, 'How can I grow in holiness?' then I suspect they've begun to understand.
D. A. CarsonFor example, the Bible does say this is a proposition, "There is no God." But of course the context of Psalm 14:1 enriches it a bit: "the fool has said in his heart, there is no God." So there are contextual constraints and when you finish putting in all the contextual constraints and sophisticated discussions of what inerrancy is and isn't.
D. A. CarsonOne cannot fail to observe a crushing irony: the gospel of relativistic tolerance is perhaps the most โevangelisticโ movement in Western culture at the moment, demanding assent and brooking no rivals.
D. A. CarsonMake a mistake in the interpretation of one of Shakespeareโs plays, falsely scan a piece of Spenserian verse, and there is unlikely to be an entailment of eternal consequence; but we cannot lightly accept a similar laxity in the interpretation of Scripture. We are dealing with Godโs thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly.
D. A. Carson