Matt Walsh Quotes
Best 25 Church of Cowards Quotes by Matt Walsh
Church of Cowards Quotes
“Ask the average American Christian to tell you how his life would be different if he didn’t believe in Christ, and he will struggle to provide a single example. And this fact will not trouble him. He is supremely confident in his own spiritual complacency.
He laughs at the very notion that God might send him to Hell. He has no problem believing that some people are damned — a lot of people, even — but not him. He lives in a fog of cowardly and comfortable delusion, and it grows thicker by the day.”
“Christ responded to each temptation by quoting scripture. This, again, was for our benefit. Our Lord didn’t need to get into a theological debate with Satan. He didn’t need to provide the Devil with any exegetical justifications for His actions. But He, the Word, leans on the Word, because that is what we must do when the Devil comes knocking on our door.
Jesus is warning us not to rely on our own understanding, our own will, or our own strength when the forces of darkness are scheming against us. All we can do or should do is cleave to God, His Word, and His Righteousness. The Devil cannot carry us away when we are hugging tightly to the Lord. He cannot claim us when we are huddled under the cross.”
“For the majority of human history, it was taken for granted that a person’s status as 'man' or 'woman' was purely biological and determined by his or her sex at birth. Nobody had any notion of a 'gender spectrum' or 'gender fluidity'.
There have always been effeminate men and masculine women, but there was never any thought given to the possibility that the effeminate man might really be a woman, and the masculine woman might really be a man.
But as the irrational, anti-scientific, and superstitious belief in 'transgenderism' was introduced into the cultural bloodstream by academia and Hollywood, individual Americans, feeling the increasing peer pressure, quickly forsook their knowledge of basic human biology and adopted progressive gender theory wholesale.”
“God does not want my bare minimum. God does not want me to go just one step further than other people. He does not say, 'Be good enough'. He does not say, 'Be better than most'. He says, 'Be perfect'.
Of course, it’s hard to shoot for perfection. It is all the harder when you are surrounded by people who are not even trying. The world tells us that there is no such thing as good or bad.
All is permissible. Sin is no big deal. Some sins are even laudatory. There is no perfection. But Christ calls us out of that relativistic fog — all the way out. Not to mere acceptability or decency, but to holiness, to sainthood. He will settle for nothing less, so neither can we.”
“Here’s the really beautiful and remarkable thing: it doesn’t matter how far we’ve climbed. All that matters is that we have begun. Christ does not say 'get to this point here', or 'you must make it over that first peak'. He says only, 'Come. Start your journey now. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter who you were before. Repent of those ways, leave them down there in the dark, in the shadows, and come with Me'.
There is joy and glory at the top. But you must come now. There is no time to waste. A man may live his life in the shadows and be saved in the end because he took just one step up. A man may take many steps up the mountain but be destroyed in the end because he gave up too soon and started to descend back into the valley.
A man may climb up, and lose his grip, and trip at certain points, and hurt his shoulder, break his leg, knock out a tooth, and still find the top at the end because he kept going in spite of it all. The main thing is just to climb.”
“How many of us are willing to give up anything — let alone everything? Most of us will lash out bitterly if we are asked to make any sacrifice at all, any adjustment to our lives, any change to our lifestyles.
We will shriek in horror if anyone suggests, say, that we give up watching certain television shows or listening to certain music. We will explode in fury if anyone questions whether a Christian ought to watch p*rnography, or dress provocatively, or use profanity. We will laugh and mock and practically spit at any critic who dares to look at something we do, something we enjoy, something that gives us pleasure, and question whether it is proper.
Most of us, if we are being perfectly honest, cannot think of one thing — one measly thing — that we greatly enjoy and have the means to do yet have stopped doing because we know it is inconsistent with our faith. I do not believe that I exaggerate when I say that the average American Christian has never given up one single thing for Christ.”
“I will fold acceptance and tolerance together here because they are generally treated as if interchangeable. In modern parlance they’re both just extensions of 'welcoming'. To welcome is to tolerate, to tolerate is to accept.
This is wrong, of course. It is possible to be welcoming toward someone without necessarily tolerating his behavior, and it is possible to tolerate someone without accepting everything he does. Our culture demands acceptance — more than that, celebration — of all lifestyles and life choices, but it often makes those demands under the guise of less intrusive sounding words like 'tolerance' and 'welcoming'.”
“If we are to be living Christians, then we can never stay in one place. We are always traveling towards God — or else away from Him. To finally and completely reach God is to enter into Him, to live within Him in Heaven.
But we will never arrive at that point in the course of our mortal existence. We can only get closer and closer to the end goal, or further and further from it. This is why Christ tells us repeatedly in scripture to 'follow' Him. He does not tell us to stand beside Him, or sit, or lie on the ground near Him.”
“In 'The Brothers Karamazov', Dostoevsky wrote: If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be permissible, even cannibalism.
All of the Russian author’s great works revolve, in one way or another, around this idea: that a life without God is not worth living – and barely livable. He is right. And it is better for the unbeliever to confront the spiritual desolation of unbelief, and to really feel its emptiness and coldness, than for him to push those thoughts away while still remaining in his squalid state.”
“It is easy to be virtuous in our world because we have adopted easy virtues. We applaud ourselves for our goodness, but it costs nothing to be 'good' in modern times. A man can be good just by sitting in his living room. The couch potato is the new paragon of virtue, exceeded in goodness only by the man in a coma.
Virtue has been pulled down from its lofty perch and made accessible to the inert. By this standard, the most virtuous thing on the planet is a turnip or a blade of grass. It just sits there and says nothing and does nothing and does not get in the way.
The church, once the stalwart defender of real virtues, now promotes cheap and shallow ones. Christians are not often exhorted to courage, chastity, fidelity, temperance, and modesty anymore. Those virtues require action and sacrifice and intention and thought and sometimes pain. They ask you to do something for their sake, become something, be something. These are the formidable, inconvenient virtues. You must rise to them because they will not come down to you.
Luckily for us, we are no longer asked to strive for those high virtues. Instead we are encouraged to be welcoming, accepting, and tolerant. The turnip virtues. Compassionate, too. Always compassionate. And I agree, of course, that a Christian ought to be welcoming, accepting, and tolerant. Certainly he must be compassionate. But these virtues have superseded and ultimately consumed all the others.”
“It’s not fair for anyone to be given what is not his, yet our Father opens up eternal joy to us, despite the fact that it isn’t rightfully ours and we’ve done nothing to earn it or deserve it.
This knowledge should make us eternally grateful for any blessing, however small, and totally accepting of any suffering, however large, knowing that it’s only the smallest portion of the suffering we’re due.”
“Nothing is stopping us. We’re stopping ourselves. We are comfortable — and consumed by our comforts.”
“Sure, we’ve come up with theological excuses for not going to church, not changing our lifestyles, not really doing anything at all. We’ve found a verse or two that justify our laziness in our minds. This is the one area of religion where we exert some effort: in finding excuses to not be religious.
But our brothers and sisters in the East know nothing of these excuses. They can’t conceive of why we’d even want to find them. They look at us and say with exasperation: You can be as Christian as you want and nobody will hurt you. Nobody will kill you. You can shout about Christ from the rooftops.
So why aren’t you on the rooftops? Why aren’t you shouting? Well, we might lose Facebook friends. Someone might accuse us of being weird. And, besides, if we start being really Christian then we might feel guilty about all of the gossiping we do at work, all the lies we tell, all the sexual sins we commit, all the p*rn we watch on our computers while our wives and children are asleep.
We might feel ashamed of the fact that we drink too much and spend too much of our money on frivolous things, and that we give nothing to charity, and that we make no sacrifices at all, and that we live just like everyone else lives. That’s what’s stopping us.”
“Television is a passive experience, which makes it the perfect medium for shaping minds. The unresisting mind is most easily shaped. Especially an unresisting mind that does not realize it is being shaped.
We begin to act like the people we see on TV, dress like them, speak like them, think like them; we adopt their viewpoints and priorities. We do all of this without noticing it.
Five or six or seven hours a day watching TV, thirty-five or forty hours a week, two thousand hours a year, year after year – after a while, we cannot distinguish our real lives from the fantasy world we enter through the screen.”
“The multiplication of desires. This is what our culture has given us. It gives us things and the desire for those things. And the more attached we are to things — whether those things are physical objects, or sins, or pets, or people — the less we hunger for the real bread of eternal life (see John 6:55).
We are like a man dying of malnutrition despite having a pantry full of food. He stuffed himself with soda and chips and chocolate, but it wasn’t enough. It couldn’t sustain him. And he never felt the hunger pains because he had filled his stomach with junk.
Every petty and meaningless desire of ours is filled. We have so much that we even invent new desires and fulfill them, too. Every day you hear about some new fetish, some new perverse interest that has taken hold of some segment of society. And with these new fetishes always come new 'rights'. We plunge into ourselves and bring to the surface every dark and depraved and strange desire we can find, and then we fight for the right to satisfy it.
We not only indulge ourselves, we even feel heroic in our indulgence. We have made selfishness into a cause; a banner under which we march and sing songs of victory. All of it is empty, none of it has any substance, but we drown our souls in it, in this sea of nothingness, and God is pushed ever further to the periphery.
As Jeremiah said, we have gone after empty idols and become empty ourselves; we have exchanged our glory for useless things (Jeremiah 2:5, 2:11). Our lives have become consumed by so much noise, so much commotion, so much food, so much media, so many advertisements, so many lights and sounds, and all it does is keep us focused on a million things besides the one thing that matters. We run from God into the haze of modern culture, and we lose Him somewhere in the chaos, in the noise.”
“The world is full of weak, pitiful sinners like myself, people just looking for a way around our duties and obligations. A way to follow Christ without taking up our cross. A way to be a Christian without making sacrifices. A way to enter Heaven while holding onto a piece of earth.”
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“When someone comes along and expresses him or herself as freely as they think, people flock to it. They enjoy it.”
“This is the great problem with American society: It is the widest gate the world has ever known. We are free to spread our arms and live exactly as we wish. But true freedom is not found in living exactly as we wish, but in living as God wishes.”
“We are told that despair – or depression, as we call it today – is a mental illness. But how can we call someone ill for being in despair when he has so many good reasons for that despair? We do nothing for a despairing man by numbing his sadness while leaving him to his empty, miserable existence.”
“We are too numb. Our faith is too stagnant, too stale, too watered-down, too wide. The great paradox of our religion is that the gate to eternal life is narrow, but God is larger than the cosmos itself.
To get through the narrow gate, we must cling to that vast, eternal Being. If we cling instead to smaller things — our jobs, our relationships, our ambitions, our friends, our hobbies, our phones, our pets, or anything else — then we will not fit through the narrow passage.
We will find ourselves on the broad path to destruction. We are so firmly set on this ruinous path, many of us, that we don’t even think of Him most of the time. We make little or no attempt to conform our lives to His commandments or to walk the narrow path that Christ forged for us. We are too busy for that. It’s inconvenient. It’s dull.
Christ says, 'Pick up your cross and follow Me', but we take it as a suggestion — just one possible way to live the Christian life. We leave our crosses on the side of the road and head back inside where it’s warm and there’s a new Netflix show to binge. We tell ourselves that we’ll be fine in the end because we are decent people and we are leading normal lives, and God cannot penalize what is normal. And Satan laughs.”
“We celebrate ‘freedom’ – which has become nothing more than the freedom to destroy ourselves. Our founders envisioned a people free to be moral and religious, enabled to achieve their full spiritual potential liberated from the oppression of a tyrannous government.
We have taken this spiritual freedom and turned it into spiritual slavery… Only the slave to Christ is free. The slave to Satan is wrung out like a sponge until he is nothing but a husk, and then the husk is incinerated.”
“We complacent Christians have lost sight of the eternal hope. We talk about the need to be hopeful, we like the idea of hope, but our hope lies in things temporal. We hope for comfort and pleasure along the road. We have hopes for the day, hopes for the year, maybe even 'long-term' hopes for things five or ten years down the road.
But all of our hopes have expiration dates. We are constantly achieving our meager and temporary hopes, finding that they do not satisfy, and then scrambling to conjure a new hope, a new purpose, a new source of satisfaction.”
“We learn about the categories of temptation that Satan will use against us. Satan tempted Christ to turn stones into bread, appealing to appetite. Then Satan tempted Christ to worship him, the Devil, in exchange for all of the wealth and power in the world, appealing to the desire for wealth and power.
Then, appealing to pride, Satan tempted Christ to fling Himself off a precipice so that the angels would come and rescue Him, thus demonstrating His magnificence and glory to the masses. It seems that Satan seeks to make us gluttons, materialists, or egoists. He will settle for just one, but often he has no problem convincing us to be all three.”
“We live in a valley and death casts its shadow over us all. We can be swallowed by it any time. We are only here today because God, through supernatural effort, has kept us here. He holds death back with His hand.
One day, when we have reached our conclusion, for better or worse, he will let go and let it take us. From there we will enter eternal life or eternal damnation based not on what we have done or achieved, but on where we were already going.
If we were following the Evil One down into the depths, that is where we will land. But if we were following Christ up the mountain, we will ascend after death to its peak.”
“Wrapped up in all of this talk of acceptance and tolerance is the matter of judgment. The worst thing in the world, we are told, is to judge. We must never judge, never be judgmental.
We are constantly reminded that Jesus said, 'Do not judge' (Matthew 7:1). And those three words have become the most popular words ever uttered by Our Lord. We like to pretend that everything else He said is summarized by this one phrase. We treat 'Do not judge' as the distillation of His life and ministry.
There are over seven hundred thousand words in the Bible (yes, I counted), and we have come to believe that they all can be condensed down into those three. We’re wrong.
Yes, He does tell us not to judge. But to understand what 'Do not judge' actually means, and how it ought to apply to our lives, we have to look at those words in the context of Christ’s teachings. We don’t even have to look very hard, because He makes the point clear in the very same chapter of the Bible.
Here is the full verse from the seventh chapter of Matthew:
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?
How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye', when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
The point here is that we must judge rightly and fairly, as Jesus says specifically in John 7:24: 'Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.'
The whole Bible is chock-full of judgments we are told to make about ourselves, about others, about actions and things and situations. Of course Jesus is not warning against judgment per se. He is warning, instead, against hypocritical and self-serving judgments.
He says we must attend to the plank in our own eyes rather than focusing on the dust in our brother’s eye. But He does not recommend that we just leave our brother there to deal with the dust on his own. He tells us to take the plank out of our own eyes first and then help with the dust.
This is both a practical and moral prescription. Moral because ignoring your plank would be self-righteous and dishonest. Practical because you cannot see well enough to handle the dust problem if you’ve got a big plank sticking in your eye.
Judgment is good. We are commanded to judge. But our judgments themselves must be good, and made out of love and concern for our brother.”
“You can lie to yourself all you want, but you cannot drag me into it. And so it goes for pronouns. If I intentionally call a man 'she', I have lied. I have conveyed something that isn’t true.
Despite my polite intentions, all I’ve done is contribute to the confusion, dishonesty, and intellectual chaos rampant in our culture.”
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“Clearly, the naked ape is the sexiest primate alive. To find the reason for this we have to look back again at his origins. What happened? First, he had to hunt if he was to survive. Second, he had to have a better brain to make up for his poor hunting body. Third, he had to have a longer childhood to grow the bigger brain and to educate it. Fourth, the females had to stay put and mind the babies while the males went hunting. Fifth, the males had to cooperate with one another on the hunt. Sixth, they had to stand up straight and use weapons for the hunt to succeed. I am not implying that these changes happened in that order; on the contrary they undoubtedly all developed gradually at the same time, each modification helping the others along. I am simply enumerating the six basic, major changes that took place as the hunting ape evolved. Inherent in these changes there are, I believe, all the ingredients necessary to make up our present sexual complexity.”
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