“Oh,” say you, “but I cannot believe.” Cannot believe! Then do you know what you are doing? You are making Him a liar. If you tell a man “I cannot believe you,” that is only another way of saying “You are a liar.” Oh, you will not dare to say that of Christ. No, my friend, I take you by the hand and say another word—you must believe Him.

Charles H. Spurgeon, Words of Advice for Seekers

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Before man existed, God acted. Before man stirs himself to seek God, God has sought man. In the Bible we do not see man groping after God; we see God reaching after man.

John Stott, Basic Christianity