KIERKEGAARDtraining2

O Lord Jesus Christ, there is so much to drag us back: empty pursuits, trivial pleasures, unworthy cares. There is so much to frighten us away: a pride too cowardly to submit to being helped, cowardly apprehensiveness which evades danger to its own destruction, anguish for sin which shuns holy cleansing as disease shuns medicine. But Thou art stronger than these, so draw Thou us now more strongly to Thee.

O man, why doth thine eye look only to its own?

Only through the consciousness of sin is there entrance to it, and the wish to enter in by any other way is the crime of lese-majeste against Christianity.

Sufferers whose tongues run easily over the story of their sufferings neither labor nor are heavy laden.

The five, the seven, the fifteen, the eighteen hundred years are neither here nor there; they do not change Him, neither do they in any wise reveal who He was, for who He is is revealed only to faith.

The invitation to all throws open the Inviter's arms, and there He stands, an everlasting picture.

The proofs which Scripture presents for Christ's divinity--His miracles, His Resurrection from the dead, His Ascension into heaven--are therefore only for faith, that is, they are not "proofs," they have no intention of proving that all this agrees perfectly with reason; on the contrary they would prove that it conflicts with reason and therefore is an object of faith.

What thou dost live contemporaneous with is reality--for thee. And thus every man can be contemporary only with the age in which he lives--and then with one thing more: with Christ's life on earth; for Christ's life on earth, sacred history, stands for itself alone outside history.