God has only one intended destiny for mankind—holiness. His only goal is to produce saints. God is not some eternal blessing-machine for people to use…. Never tolerate, because of sympathy for yourself or others, any practice that is not in keeping with a holy...
Sometimes you just need to talk about something, not to get sympathy or help, but just to kill its power by allowing the truth of things to hit the air.
What a distortion of the gospel it is to have limited sympathies and unlimited certainties!
If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you...
One great reason why the rich, in general, have so little sympathy for the poor is because they so seldom visit them. Hence it is, that according to the common observation, one part of the world does not know what the other suffers. Many of them do not know because...
To forgive is extraordinary. And divine. And uncommon--and not instinctive. In fact, forgiveness runs precisely counter to our instincts. It tugs us beyond the place where we would want to declare our pain, nurse our hurts and invoke sympathy. It encourages us to give...
Music, of course, does not remake us; the Holy Spirit does. But it seems possible that music may be one means by which the Holy Spirit makes us people who feel and respond. We are brought to our senses. We are drawn out of the darkness of self-absorption and become...
To believe in Christ’s rising and death’s dying is also to live with the power and the challenge to rise up now from all our dark graves of suffering love. If sympathy for the world’s wounds is not enlarged by our anguish, if love for those around us is not expanded,...