“At the sight of men’s sins . . . always decide to use humble love. If you resolve to do that, once and for all, you can subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things and there is nothing else like it.”- Fyodor Dostoevsky “If your brother or sister […]
“The cross shows that God is committed to both justice and forgiveness; there is no pitting one against the other. When Jesus died on the cross, it meant that in a single stroke justice was done on sin and the door for forgiveness opened. . . . We must pursue both together as well.”- Timothy […]
“Silence happens on Saturday. After trouble hits you, after the agony of Friday, you call out to God. . . . On Saturday, in addition to the pain of Friday, there is the pain and the silence of the absence of God.”- John Ortberg, Who is This Man? (2012) “Surely he hath borne our griefs […]
“By not forgiving, I chain myself to a desire to get even, thereby losing my freedom. A forgiven person forgives. This is what we proclaim when we pray ‘and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.’ This lifelong struggle lies at the heart of the Christian life.”- Henri Nouwen, […]
“The heart dresses up vengeance as if it were justice: ‘It will be perfectly fair and just — I will simply hurt them just as they did me.’ But that is seldom what happens. . . . Soon the mask of supposed justice falls away and the face of revenge is revealed.”- Timothy Keller “You […]
“If you have a God who is nothing but wrath, and if you have little understanding of what happened on the cross, you’ll be a driven person. You’ll try very hard to be moral . . . but you will always feel unworthy. It will be hard to grow into a loving person, because fear […]
“The concept of substitution may be said, then, to be at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. . . . Man claims prerogatives which belong to God alone; God accepts penalties which […]
“Real love stands against the deception, the lie, the sin that destroys. Anger and love are inseparably bound in human experience. And if I, a flawed, [narcissistic], and sinful woman can feel this much pain and anger over someone’s condition, how much more a morally perfect God who made them. Anger isn’t the opposite of […]
“Modern people struggle with the idea of a wrathful God who condemns, yet [in John 3:16-18] the Bible puts condemnation in proximity to the most famous verse on love. . . . Indeed, the Bible tells us that in God, not only are [his love and anger] not in tension, but they are meaningless apart […]
“But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing. Forgiveness says, ‘Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly what it was before.’ But excusing says, ‘I see that you couldn’t help or […]
“There is nothing more astonishing than to realize that even the prophets called by God to tell Israel about their sin and the coming judgment could not avoid speaking in the most moving way about God’s grace and mercy. The message of the prophets, then, is that no amount of human evil and recalcitrance can […]
“Let us wonder! / Grace and justice / Join and point to mercy’s store. / When in grace through Christ our trust is, / Justice smiles and asks no more.”- John Newton “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice […]