Daily Inspiration Quote by E. Stanley Jones

A lot is smuggled into that small word “reaction.” E. Stanley Jones isn’t romanticizing spirituality as a private feeling; he’s staking a claim about what happens after the feeling, when you’re cut off in traffic, betrayed, bored, tempted, or afraid. “Depths” gestures toward the inner life most people can’t fake for long: instinct, resentment, hunger for control, the old scripts that run before you can edit them. Jones suggests that Christianity isn’t proven in polished speech or doctrinal performance, but in the reflexes that surface under pressure.

The line’s quiet provocation is its reversal of the usual moral order. We like to imagine we act well because we are good. Jones implies the opposite: goodness is often the byproduct of support, of being “upheld.” That verb matters. It’s not self-mastery; it’s being carried. In Jones’s theology, the Holy Spirit isn’t a decorative add-on to ethics but the load-bearing structure that makes Christlike behavior possible when the psyche dips into its basement.

Contextually, Jones spent decades in missionary and revival settings, arguing for an “indigenized” Christianity in India and stressing inner transformation over Western respectability. This sentence fits a 20th-century pastoral realism: modern life reveals how thin mere willpower is. The subtext is bracing: if your reactions aren’t Christian, the problem may not be your ideals but what’s (not) holding you up when you’re deepest in yourself.