All that we call human history–money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery–[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
– C.S. Lewis
Rebellion | Happiness | History
The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God; the tragedy is that, knowing Him, they still insist on going their own way.
– William Barclay
Rebellion
By delay of repentance, sin strengthens, and the heart hardens. The longer ice freezeth, the harder it is to be broken.
– Thomas Watson
Rebellion
Satan’s fall came before man’s; we therefore can learn about our fallen state from Satan’s plunge. Satan was created as a spirit that he might have direct communion with God. But he fell away and became the head of the powers of darkness. He now is separated from God and from every godly virtue. Man’s spirit still exists but is separated from God, powerless to commune with Him and incapable of ruling. Spiritually speaking, man’s spirit is dead. Nonetheless, as the spirit of the sinful archangel exists forever so the spirit of sinful man continues too. Because he has a body his fall rendered him a man of the flesh (Gen 6:3). No religion of this world, no ethics, culture or law can improve this fallen human spirit. Man has degenerated into a fleshly position; nothing from himself can return him to a spiritual state. Wherefore regeneration or regeneration of the spirit is absolutely necessary. The Son of God alone can restore us to God, for He shed His blood to cleanse our sins and give us a new life.
– Watchman Nee
Rebellion | Atonement | Restoration
Seducers are more dangerous enemies to the church than persecutors.
– Matthew Henry
Rebellion | Enemies | Persecution
Even in a time of desperation the flesh continues to scheme and to search for a loophole. It never has the sense of utter dependency. This alone can be a test whereby a believer may know whether or not a work is of the flesh.
– Watchman Nee
Rebellion
You can operate your business without Christ. You can make it run well. You can raise your family without Christ. You can even pastor a church without Christ. But if you do, you will find that there will be no fruit, no Christlikeness, no manifestation of that beautiful character which arrests the attention of others. Instead there will be a sham, a phony imitation of the real thing, which will drive people away from Christ and will produce nothing but a dull, mechanical religiosity.
– Ray C. Stedman
Hypocrisy | Rebellion
Verily, we know not what an evil it is to indulge ourselves, and to make an idol of our will.
– Samuel Rutherford
Rebellion | Idolatry
He that has no present Christ has a future, dark, chaotic, heaving with its destructive ocean; and over it there goes forever–black-pinioned winging its solitary and hopeless flight, the raven of his anxious thoughts, and finds no place to rest, and comes back again to the desolate ark with its foreboding croak of evil in the present and evil in the future.
– Alexander MacLaren
RebellionThe Future
Many of those who once were so passionately in love with Christ now run about pursuing their own interests. They’re burdened down with stress and problems, chasing after riches and the things of this world.
– David Wilkerson
Rebellion | Wealth
Whatever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.
– Edmund Burke
Rebellion | Unity
Man can certainly flee from God but he cannot escape him. He can certainly hate God and be hateful to God, but he cannot change into its opposite the eternal love of God which triumphs even in his hate.
– Karl Barth
Rebellion | Hatred
The basic cause of the many problems in the world today is not that man fails to recognize his godhood but rather that there are about seven billion gods on this planet, each one doing his or her own thing.
– Dave Hunt
Rebellion
We may be often not in right circumstances, but Christ ever knows how to speak to us in them.
– G.V. Wigram
Rebellion
The wicked is a very coward, and is afraid of everything; of God, because He is his enemy; of Satan, because he is his tormentor; of God’s creatures, because they, joining with their Maker, fight against him; of himself, because he bears about with him his own accuser and executioner.
– Joseph Hall
Rebellion
Hatred obscures all distinctions.
– C.S. Lewis
Rebellion | Hatred
You cannot escape Christ, do what you will. You reject His divinity, but, so doing, you have not evaded Him. If He is a man just like us, then obviously you must be a man like Him.
– A. J. Gossip
Rebellion
If we persist in holding on to something which God wants us to relinquish, sin shall have dominion over us, and our reckoning shall be futile.
– Watchman Nee
Sin | Rebellion
Neither son loved the father for himself. They both were using the father for their own self-centered ends rather than loving, enjoying, and serving him for his own sake. This means that you can rebel against God and be alienated from him either by breaking his rules or by keeping all of them diligently. It’s a shocking message: Careful obedience to God’s law may serve as a strategy for rebelling against God.
– Tim Keller
Rebellion
Today’s civil libertarians ignore our unmistakable history when they attempt to stifle religious expression in our nation.
– Jonathan Falwell
Ignorance | Rebellion
When our will runs parallel with the will of God, no cross is formed; but when our will runs counter to God’s will, a cross is formed which is heavy to be borne.
– James H. Aughey
Rebellion
You cannot escape Christ, do what you will. You reject His divinity, but, so doing, you have not evaded Him. If He is a man just like us, then obviously you must be a man like Him.
– A.J. Gossip
Rebellion
That which a man spits against heaven, shall fall back on his own face.
– Thomas Adams
Rebellion
Common experience declares how momentary and how useless are those violent fits and gusts of endeavors which proceed from fear and uncertainty, both in things spiritual and things temporal, or civil. Whilst men are under the power of actual impressions from such fears, they will convert to God, yea, they will turn in a moment, and perfect their holiness in an instant; but so soon as that impression wears off (as it will do on every occasion, and upon none at all) such persons are as dead and cold towards God as the lead or iron, which but now ran in a fiery stream, is now when the heat is departed from it.
– John Owen
Rebellion
In addition to being completely blasphemous and a deadly form of occultism that deters people from seeking medical help, the healing and prosperity movement spawns ultimate rebellion in the name of God.
– T.A. McMahon
Rebellion
One sin is a step to another more heinous; for not observing, is followed with not remembering, and forgetfulness of duty drawled on disobedience and rebellion.
– David Dickson
Rebellion
Unwillingness to accept God’s “way of escape” from temptation frightens me what a rebel yet resides within.
– Jim Elliot
Humility | Temptation | Rebellion
As long as your sin breaks your heart, as long as your disobedience makes you lie awake nights and wet your pillow in tears there is hope for you. But when you become contented with your wickedness, when you come to believe that it is the best possible for you, then you are in danger indeed.
– Clovis G. Chappell
Sin | Rebellion
We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.
– Thomas Merton
Rebellion
Thou hast an art above God Himself, if thou canst fetch any true pleasure out of unholiness.
– William Gurnall
Rebellion
The Bible says all men are without excuse. Even those who are given no good reason to believe and many persuasive reasons to disbelieve have no excuse, because the ultimate reason they do not believe is that they have deliberately rejected God’s Holy Spirit.
– William Lane Craig
Rebellion | The Holy Spirit
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “All right, then, have it your way.”
– C.S. Lewis
Contentment | Rebellion
Be very sure of this – people never reject the Bible because they cannot understand it. They understand it too well; they understand that it condemns their own behavior; they understand that it witnesses against their own sins, and summons them to judgment. They try to believe it is false and useless, because they don’t like to believe it is true.
– J. C. Ryle
Rebellion
How can I step out of God’s will save into something that cannot be wished?’
– C.S. Lewis
Rebellion
The test of observance of Christ’s teachings is our consciousness of our failure to attain an ideal perfection. The degree to which we draw near this perfection cannot be seen; all we can see is the extent of our deviation.
– Philip Yancey
Rebellion
To live by one man’s will becomes the cause of all misery.
– Assorted Authors
Rebellion
This is Degeneration–that principle by which the organism, failing to develop itself, failing even to keep what it has got, deteriorates, and becomes more and more adapted to a degraded form of life.
– Henry Drummond
Rebellion
There are many today who have separated themselves from the services of the church, from the fellowship of the saints, because of a deadening indifference. They have become absorbed in a thousand other matters till they have become doubly uninterested in the things of the church and in the affairs of the Kingdom.
– Clovis G. Chappell
Rebellion
I believe prayer for our nation has never been more important as we witness an accelerating anti-Christian fervor in the so-called mainstream of our culture.
– Jonathan Falwell
Prayer | Rebellion
The least reproach poured upon God is an infinite wrong. And the reproach of his people is so much his, as he reckons it as his own; and will therefore render to their enemies their reproach “sevenfold” (and that’s but equal) “into their bosom.”
– Abraham Wright
Rebellion
The Lord made it very plain in the New Testament that believers cannot escape reaping the kind of harvest they sow. We cannot hide our sin; we will not get away with it. The secrets of the night are not hidden from God.
– Theodore Epp
Rebellion | Justice
The beginning of men’s rebellion against God was, and is, the lack of a thankful heart.
– Francis Schaeffer
Rebellion | The Heart
When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.
– C.S. Lewis
Rebellion
The only “Scripture” most of today’s uncertain souls know is an emasculated, paraphrased “Bible,” rewritten to eliminate conviction of sin and catering to the rebellion of those who insist upon having the gospel modified to suit their unbelief. God will not accommodate their rebellion!
– Dave Hunt
Rebellion | Scripture | Unbelief
This act of self-will on the part of the creature, which constitutes an utter falseness to its true creaturely position, is the only sin that can be conceived as the Fall.
– C.S. Lewis
Sin | Rebellion
The will is a beast of burden. If God mounts it, it wishes and goes as God wills; if Satan mounts it, it wishes and goes as Satan wills; Nor can it choose its rider – the riders contend for its possession.
– Martin Luther
Rebellion
Our nation is being led astray by ungodly judges, mayors and governors, who are given to change, defying the Constitution and substituting their own wicked agendas.
– David Wilkerson
America | Rebellion
A ‘disorderly walk’ denotes conduct that is in any way contrary to the rules of Christ. The word would include any violation of the rules of Christ.
– Albert Barnes
Rebellion
Sin is the dare of God’s justice, the rape of His mercy, the jeer of His patience, the slight of His power, and the contempt of His love.
– John Bunyan
Sin | Rebellion
Every one of us is, even from his mother’s womb, a master craftsman of idols.
– John Calvin
Rebellion | Idolatry
Let us beware of rebellion against the Lord. Circumstances are of his choosing, because He wants to bless us, to lead us (even through the wilderness) out of Egypt, that is, out of ourselves. Settle the complaint with God, and it will settle other things. Be offended with God, and you will be offended with everyone who crosses your path.
– Elisabeth Elliot
Rebellion | Circumstances
It is better to be sick in the will of God than well outside His blessed will.
– John R. Rice
Rebellion
When a denomination begins to consider doctrine divisive, theology troublesome, and convictions inconvenient, consider that denomination on its way to a well-deserved death.
– Albert Mohler
Doctrine | Rebellion
It is a distinct fact by itself, which we can hold and examine separately, that on purely natural principles the soul that is left to itself unwatched, uncultivated, unredeemed, must fall away into death by its own nature.
– Henry Drummond
Rebellion
If you do get lost, some of you will have to wade through your mother’s tears and leap over your father’s prayers and your minister’s entreaties. You will have to force a passage through the warnings of godly people and the examples of pious relatives. Why this effort to destroy your own souls?
– Charles Spurgeon
Rebellion
Sin and the child of God are incompatible. They may occasionally meet; they cannot live together in harmony.
– John Stott
Rebellion | Sin
We need to attack the false foundation of autonomous human reasoning that leads to evolution and millions of years, and proclaim that God’s revealed Word is authoritative and its history of the world is foundational to Christian morality and the gospel of Jesus Christ.
– Ken Ham
Scripture | Rebellion | Evolution
Intellectual deception always follows moral rejection.
– Winkie Pratney
Rebellion | Deception
A man rejects God neither because of intellectual demands nor because of the scarcity of evidence. A man rejects God because of a moral resistance that refuses to admit his need for God.
– Ravi Zacharias
Rebellion
The least reproach poured upon God is an infinite wrong. And the reproach of his people is so much his, as he reckons it as his own; and will therefore render to their enemies their reproach “sevenfold” (and that’s but equal) “into their bosom.”
– Abraham Wright
Rebellion
He that has no present Christ has a future, dark, chaotic, heaving with its destructive ocean; and over it there goes forever–black-pinioned winging its solitary and hopeless flight, the raven of his anxious thoughts, and finds no place to rest, and comes back again to the desolate ark with its foreboding croak of evil in the present and evil in the future.
– Alexander MacLaren
Rebellion | The Future
I believe the man who is not willing to submit to the electing love and sovereign grace of God has great reason to question whether he is a Christian at all, for the spirit that kicks against that is the spirit of the unhumbled, unrenewed heart.
– Charles Spurgeon
Rebellion
When a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God’s Spirit on his heart.
– William Lane Craig
Rebellion
Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God.
– William Law
Rebellion
And therefore you who think so basely of the Gospel and the professors of it, because at present their peace and comfort are not come, should know that it is on the way to them, and comes to stay everlastingly with them; whereas your peace is going from you every moment, and is sure to leave you without any hope of returning to you again. Look not how the Christian begins, but ends.
– William Gurnall
Rebellion
The gravitation away from God, ‘the journey homeward to habitual self’, must, we think, be a product of the Fall.
– C.S. Lewis
Rebellion
Now we may infer from any defeat of ours that it is due either to lack of faith or failure to obey. No other reason can suffice.
– Watchman Nee
Faith | Rebellion
That’s the America you live in! A country founded on a compact with God, forged from the idea that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights is now a country where taxpayers can be forced to subsidize “artistic” exhibits of aborted fetuses. But don’t start thinking about putting up a Ten Commandments display.
– Ann Coulter
America | Rebellion
Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.
– C.S. Lewis
Rebellion
Various are the pleas and arguments which men of corrupt minds frequently urge against yielding obedience to the just and holy commands of God.
– George Whitefield
Rebellion
Rebellion against divine election is often founded on the idea that the sinner has a sort of right to be saved, and this is to deny the full desert of sin.
– Charles Spurgeon
Rebellion
The treatment of our Lord Jesus Christ by men is the clearest proof of total depravity. Those must be stony hearts indeed which can laugh at a dying Savior and mock even his faith in God!
– Charles Spurgeon
Rebellion | Depravity
This generation of Americans feel as if they have a graduate degree in understanding. Since they think they know everything there is to know, they think they don’t need God.
– Shelton Smith
America | Rebellion
Christians must understand the nature of the change that has occurred in our culture. No longer do the secularists just mock Christians from afar. They are now actively campaigning to indoctrinate children in an anti-God philosophy–to teach them to be secularists and atheists.
– Ken Ham
Rebellion | Philosophy
What’s done in secret is never a secret to God.
– Woodrow Kroll
Rebellion
He had, when in health, wickedly refused Christ, yet in his death-agony, he had superstitiously sent for me. Too late, he sighed for the ministry of reconciliation, and sought to enter in at the closed door, but he was not able. There was no space left him then for repentance, for he had wasted the opportunities which God had long granted to him.
– Charles Spurgeon
Rebellion
We are only safe when we wisely make use of all good advantages that we have access to. By going out of God’s ways we go out of His government, and so lose our good frame of mind, and find ourselves overspread quickly with a contrary disposition. When we draw near to Christ (James 4:8), in His ordinances, He draws near to us.
– Richard Sibbes
Rebellion
The world’s corruption is a result of its defiance.
– Warren Wiersbe
Rebellion
If you reject God’s best for you, then He tries to get you to realize His second best. If you reject this, then He seeks to bring you to the next best. But remember this; God cannot, in the very nature of things, make as much out of a fraction of a life as He can out of the whole of a life.
– Clovis G. Chappell
Rebellion
The test of observance of Christ’s teachings is our consciousness of our failure to attain an ideal perfection. The degree to which we draw near this perfection cannot be seen; all we can see is the extent of our deviation.
– Phillips Brooks
Rebellion
There are those who insist that it is a very bad thing to question God. To them, “why?” is a rude question. That depends, I believe, on whether it is an honest search, in faith, for His meaning, or whether it is the challenge of unbelief and rebellion.
– Elisabeth Elliot
Rebellion | Unbelief
Sin is not weakness, it is a disease; it is red-handed rebellion against God and the magnitude of that rebellion is expressed by Calvary’s cross.
– Oswald Chambers
Sin | Rebellion
God can perform wonders, but so can evil spirits imitate! How crucial for us to distinguish what is of God from what is not of God. If one has not died to his emotional life but earnestly seeks sensational events, he will be easily duped.
– Watchman Nee
Rebellion
If you find a reluctancy to go into the presence of God, there may be unconfessed, unrepented sin in your life. Part of your quiet time is to get your heart clean and pure. Each of us needs to take ourselves by the nap of our necks and confess and repent before we come into God’s holy presence to fellowship.
– Adrian Rogers
Prayer | Rebellion
A ‘disorderly walk’ denotes conduct that is in any way contrary to the rules of Christ. The word would include any violation of the rules of Christ.
– Albert Barnes
Rebellion
Yet consider now, whether women are not quite past sense and reason, when they want to rule over men.
– John Calvin
Rebellion | Women
Though it may seem a completely unloving thing to put someone out of the fellowship of the church, Jesus commanded us to do this when someone refuses to repent of his or her sin… In reality, since Jesus commanded it, it would be unloving not to do it.
– Wayne Mack
Church | Rebellion
For there is no one so great or mighty that he can avoid the misery that will rise up against him when he resists and strives against God.
– John Calvin
Rebellion
All our murmurings are so many arrows shot at God Himself, and they will return upon our own hearts; they reach not Him, but they will hit us; they hurt not Him, but they will wound us; therefore it is better to be mute than to murmur; it is dangerous to provoke a consuming fire.
– James H. Aughey
Rebellion
I will not judge a person to be spiritually dead whom I have judged formerly to have had spiritual life, though I see him at present in a swoon (faint)as to all evidences of the spiritual life. And the reason why I will not judge him so is this — because if you judge a person dead, you neglect him, you leave him; but if you judge him in a swoon,(faint) though never so dangerous, you use all means for the retrieving of his life.
– John Owen
Apathy | Rebellion | Judging
Murmuring is the rising up of oneself against God. It sets oneself against God as if I am wiser than He.
– Thomas Watson
Rebellion
A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers–including even his power to revolt. It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower.
– C.S. Lewis
Rebellion
Of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.
– C.S. Lewis
Sin | Rebellion | Laughter
Secret sins commonly lie nearest the heart.
– Thomas Brooks
Rebellion | The Heart | Sin
God desires to be loved by men, although He needs them not; and men refuse to love God, though they need Him in an infinite degree.
– Assorted Authors
God | Rebellion
We need to follow our Lord’s admonition to remember Lot’s wife, for she was one who did not forget her possessions even in a time of the greatest peril. She was not guilty of having retraced a single step towards Sodom. All she did was look back. But how revealing was that backward glance! Does it not speak volumes concerning the condition of her heart?
– Watchman Nee
Rebellion