If God forgives us instantly and completely, then who are we to sulk in despair over our failures? If God finds no pleasure in condemning, then we have no right to find some sort of sadistic pleasure in self-contempt. To allow the sins of yesterday, or even an hour...
I personally know a family whose most meaningful Christmas truly embraced its spirit. [In 1986 this family thought of a needy family in their congregation that was struggling just to survive.] The parents and their two children discussed together how to help this...
…as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches… So although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. Is there no way to prevent this continued decay of true religion? We ought not prevent people from...
There is nothing that makes us love a person so much as praying for him or her… By considering yourself an advocate with God for your neighbors and friends, you would never find it hard to be at peace with them.
I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
Twenty-five years ago one of my mentors told me that the truth that I was loved all the way through was the “brute fact of the universe.” I am now just beginning to believe it. Christianity is a love affair beginning with the gasp of astonishment with which all love...
For Jesus, peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle but the presence of love. from Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC
Let us not tire of preaching love. It is the force that will overcome the world.Let us not tire of preaching love.Though we see that waves of violence succeed in drowning the fire of Christian love, love must win out; it is the only thing that can.
Why can’t we remember that his [Jesus’] last commandment was that we should love each other as he loved us? John, in his first epistle, tells us firmly that if we cannot love each other, love the people we know and have seen, we cannot love God whom we have not seen!...
Unless we are exchanging deeply committed levels of love with a few people, we will die slowly on the inside. This is precisely why so many people feel almost nothing at all. If we don’t learn to exchange love with family and friends, we will eventually grow numb and...