John Stott

“I remember a young man coming to see me when he had just left school and begun to work in London.  He had given up going to church, he said, because he could not say the Creed without being a hypocrite.  He no longer believed it.  When he had finished his explanations, I said to him, ‘If I were to answer your problems to your complete intellectual satisfaction, would you be willing to alter your manner of life?’ He smiled slightly and blushed.  His real problem was not intellectual but moral.

This, then, is the spirit in which our search must be conducted.  We must cast aside apathy, pride, prejudice and sin, and seek God in scorn of the consequences.  Of these hindrances to effective search the last two are the hardest to overcome, intellectual prejudice and moral self will.  Both are expressions of fear, and fear is the greatest enemy of the truth.  Fear paralyses our search. We know that to find God and to accept Jesus Christ would be a very inconvenient experience.  It would involve rethinking our whole outlook and life and the readjustment of our whole manner of life.  And it is a combination of moral and intellectual cowardice that make us hesitate…”

– John Stott