Francis Chan Quotes

A cockle-fish may as soon crowd the ocean into its narrow shell, as vain man ever comprehend the decrees of God!

To reflect on the essence of the Creator ... is forbidden to the human intellect because of the severance of all relation between the two existences.

If God is vast and boundless as the ocean, how can a tiny drop like man imagine what He is?

For whatever be the knowledge which we are able to obtain of God, either by perception or reflection, we must of necessity believe that He is by many degrees far better than what we perceive Him to be.

To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.

Clearly, the Scripture tells us that we lack the capacity to grasp God's infinite mind or the way He intervenes in our lives. How arrogant of us to think otherwise! Trying to analyze His omnipotence is like an amoeba attempting to comprehend the behavior of man.

Perhaps it is a human thing, to look upon such beauty and fail to encompass it.

We speak much of God, can talk of him, his ways, his works, his counsels, all the day long; the truth is, we know very little of him.

As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give glory to God

I think any apparent contradiction in scripture is my limited capacity. Me trying to understand God is like an ant trying to understand the Internet. I don't have the brain capacity.

I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me

As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.

When we speak of knowing God, it must be understood with reference to man's limited powers of comprehension. God, as He really is, is far beyond man's imagination, let alone understanding. God has revealed only so much of Himself as our minds can conceive and the weakness of our nature can bear.

Our are speculations are not the measure of our God.

Bring me a worm that can comprehend a man, and then I will show you a man that can comprehend the Triune God.

Mystery such as is given of God is beyond the power of human penetration, yet not in opposition to it.

Many of our attempts to understand Christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me. The little we do understand, that grain of sand our minds are capable of grasping, those ideas such as God is good, God feels, God loves, God knows all, are enough to keep our hearts dwelling on His majesty and otherness forever.

The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured in by the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledgeof man is an evening knowledge, vespertina cognitio, but that of God is a morning knowledge, matutina cognitio.

It is about the greatness of God, not the significance of man. God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself.

The sum total of all possible knowledge of God is not possible for a human being, not even through a true revelation. But it is one of the worthiest inquiries to see how far our reason can go in the knowledge of God.

...she wanted God to make sense. He doesn't. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant.

While it is good that we seek to know the Holy One, it is probably not so good to presume that we ever complete the task.

Our awareness of God starts where self-sufficiency ends.

Baseball is a sport where being stupid and keeping things really simple a lot of times is the right way to do things. There are very few guys that are capable of processing a lot of information and applying it and still being good at it. … I don't want to name names, but there were guys I played with that were so stupid that they're really good, because their mind never gets in the way.