Imperishable Inheritance

“I remem­ber a young man com­ing to see me when he had just left school and begun 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 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 all 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 par­a­lyzes our search. We know that to find God and to accept Jesus Christ would be a very incon­ve­nient expe­ri­ence. It would involve the rethink­ing of our whole out­look on life and the read­just­ment of our whole man­ner of life. And it is a com­bi­na­tion of intel­lec­tual and moral cow­ardice which makes us hes­i­tate. We do not find because we do not seek. We do not seek because we do not want to find, and we know that the way to be cer­tain of not find­ing is not to seek.”
John Stott, Basic Chris­tian­ity (pg. 18)