“Many people sing ‘Amazing Grace’ and give lip service to the idea, but that grace has not profoundly changed them.”- Timothy Keller “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.”- Matthew 15:8-9 (NIV) Timothy Keller concludes Chapter 6 […]
“Salvation is a hard reset; our sin is forgiven and forgotten. We are justified, just as if we had never sinned. But forgiveness is a soft reset. It’s something you need to do over and over again.”- Mark Batterson “However, as it is written: ‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and […]
“When you take offense, you stop playing offense. Your defense mechanisms kick in, and you start protecting your ego at all costs. It becomes a zero-sum game, and no one really wins. If you want to experience the miraculous, you have to offer forgiveness.”- Mark Batterson “The true saint burns grace like a 747 burns […]
“Vengeance is all about you — not about the honor of God or the good of the victims or the offender. But, on the other hand, complete withdrawal is about you as well. . . . when someone wrongs you, if you resent them on the inside but stay courteously mute on the outside, you […]
“We spend all our lives finding ways to cover up that deep, radical sense of inadequacy. . . . Why all these things? They are fig leaves. . . . These are desperate efforts to deal with the sense of unacceptability — of unlovability — we all have. But fig leaves don’t work. . . […]
“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, […]
“There are frameworks of thought within which forgiveness can find no home. Forgiveness entered the world along with the recognition of divine and human worth . . . of rights. of duty, of guilt. It cannot occur when those are not recognized.”- Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice in Love “[God] has made everything beautiful in its time. […]
“The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it less seriously in a strictly secular sense.”- Hannah Arendt, philosopher (1906-1975) In Chapter 3 (“The […]
“[We have such] impoverished contemporary understandings and practices of forgiveness in modern western culture. . . . If all that matters is individual autonomy, then forgiveness and reconciliation — which are designed to foster and maintain communion — are of little importance.”- L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness (1995) Timothy Keller concludes Chapter 2 of Forgive […]
“What lies behind this conflict over forgiveness? All the complaints around forgiveness assume definitions and models of it that indeed can be problematic. It is not enough, then, to simply call people to be more forgiving.”- Timothy Keller In Chapter 2 (“The Fading of Forgiveness’) of Forgive, Timothy Keller critiques the three current models of […]
“The human need for forgiveness appears indelible. It won’t go away by denouncing it or trying to deconstruct it. The need I’m referring to is both a profound need to grant forgiveness and to receive forgiveness. . . . Forgiveness gets down to the bottom of things — to the alienation we feel from God […]
“Mindless, reactionary acts of forgiveness do not lead to the freedom we long for. The options before us as people desiring to follow Jesus are not just extending forgiveness or withholding it. The only option is to figure out how to extend it in ways that honor our dignity, attend to our wounds, and reflect […]