“If you are able to judge God so easily, you certainly can judge the world. You must choose two of your children to spend eternity in God s new heavens and new earth....And you must choose three of your children to spend eternity in hell..... I am only asking you to do something that you believe God does. He knows every person ever conceived, and he knows them so much more deeply and clearly than you will ever know your own children...You believe he will condemn most to an eternity of torment, away from his presence and apart from his love. Mack: I don t want to be the judge... I can t do this. You suppose then that God does this so easily, but you cannot? This couldn t be real. How could God ask him to choose among his own children? Even if Katie or Josh, or Jon or Tyler committed some heinous crime, he still wouldn t do it. He couldn t! For him, it wasn t about their performance; it was about his love for them. Mack: I can t, I can t....Could I go instead?....I ll go in their place...Could I do that? He fell at her feet crying and begging now. Please let me go for my children..I am begging you. Please...Please... - Now you sound like Jesus.....That is how Jesus loves.”
“The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates name. And that is because Socrates ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.”
“God is here. This truth should fill our lives, and every Christmas should be for us a new and special meeting with God, when we allow his light and grace to enter deep into our soul.”
“A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain...This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines - they are a way of sowing to the Spirit... By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done.”
“At Sunday worship, as in every dimension of our existence, many of us pretend to believe we are sinners. Consequently, all we can do is pretend we have been forgiven. As a result, our whole spiritual life is pseudo-repentance and pseudo-bliss.”
“What we believe about God is the most important truth we believe, and it s the one truth that does the most to shape us. God is the Sun too bright for us to see. Jesus is the Prism who makes the colors beautiful and comprehensible.”
“He [Jesus] had a terrible temper, you know, undoubtedly inherited from His Father.”
“He was without any comforts of God — no feeling that God loved him — no feeling that God pitied him — no feeling that God supported him. God was his sun before — now that sun became all darkness… He was without God — he was as if he had no God. All that God had been to him before was taken from him now. He was Godless — deprived of his God. He had the feeling of the condemned, when the Judge says: “Depart from me, ye cursed,” “who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power.” He felt that God said the same to him. Ah! This is the hell which Christ suffered. The ocean of Christ’s sufferings is unfathomable… He was forsaken in the [place] of sinners. If you close with him as your surety, you will never be forsaken… “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” [The answer?] For me — for me.”
“Child, she said placing her head to mine and her callused fingers on my cheek, you can whip it and beat it senseless, you can drag it through the streets and spin on it, you can even dangle it from a tree, drive spikes trough it, and drain the last breath from it, but in the end, no matter what you do, and no matter how hard you try to kill it, love wins.”
“We spend more time asking what would Jesus do instead of what did Jesus do.”
“It is refreshing, and salutary, to study the poise and quietness of Christ. His task and responsibility might well have driven a man out of his mind. But He was never in a hurry, never impressed by numbers, never a slave of the clock.”
“Truth is the same always. Whoever ponders it will get the same answer. Buddha got it. Patanjali got it. Jesus got it. Mohammed got it. The answer is the same, but the method of working it out may vary this way or that. (115)”
“The Lord gave the wonderful promise of the free use of His Name with the Father in conjunction with doing His works. The disciple who lives only for Jesus work and Kingdom, for His will and honor, will be given the power to appropriate the promise. Anyone grasping the promise only when he wants something very special for himself will be disappointed, because he is making Jesus the servant of his own comfort. But whoever wants to pray the effective prayer of faith because he needs it for the work of the Master will learn it, because he has made himself the servant of his Lord s interests.”
“I believe that Jesus would have given His life for just one person. Jesus emptied Himself, He humbled Himself and He so yielded Himself to His Father s love that He had no ambition of His own. He was not looking to build an empire, He did not want praise or adulation or to impress people with who or how many followed Him. He stopped over and over again for just one person, for just one life.”
“The gospel of submission, commitment, decision, and victorious living is not good news about what God has achieved but a demand to save ourselves with God’s help. Besides the fact that Scripture never refers to the gospel as having a personal relationship with Jesus nor defines faith as a decision to ask Jesus to come into our heart, this concept of salvation fails to realize that everyone has a personal relationship with God already: either as a condemned criminal standing before a righteous judge or as a justified coheir with Christ and adopted child of the Father.”
“Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.”
“Your soul may belong to Jesus, but your ass belongs to the marines.”