God loved me before I actually was.
We are given an autonomy and the real autonomy... and God would much rather we went freely to hell than compel us to go to heaven.
If forgiving depended on the culprit owning up, then the victim would always be at the mercy of the perpetrator. The victim would be bound in the shackles of victimhood.
There would be those of us who say that in many ways, you worry about what the Jews in Israel are doing to themselves. Yes, they may at the moment have incredible power and are supported almost unconditionally by especially America, but most of the West as well. Yet what they are doing is contrary to the best teaching and highest teachings of their faith.
Ultimately, suffering is always political with all kinds of justifications - there are those who justify Israel's occupation of land as being a fulfillment of what God had promised.
The leaders that the world admires seem almost all to be people who haven't had things quite so smooth or easy in their lives.
People in apartheid South Africa can tell you that God cursed black people when they cursed Him. And so the hermetic people were condemned to be drawers of water and of wood.
When you think of the KKK, they actually have as their emblem a fiery cross. And they don't see any contradiction between the cross, an instrument of suffering that procured our reconciliation with God, and its use as a symbol for nefarious attacks on black people. But they believe that they are being obedient to God because they can read things that they see.
You will find that the Bible, if you want it to, will justify many things. St. Paul had a very male chauvinistic view of women. He would say things like women must not talk in church, must cover their heads, they mustn't talk and must remember that it was a woman who first tempted and this whole mess started because women messed us up. So you can read it in such a way that it justifies polygamy.
You can find justification for slavery in the Bible. Some say this is what the Bible says and that closes the argument.
People will use their religion to justify virtually anything.
A person who is assured of the love of God will see his fellow men in a different light and treat them and himself differently, and of course this also applies to business leaders.
One of the things we might want to learn when considering the failings of others is not to gloat because someone else has tripped up.
Religious people should be very active if they believe that the world belongs to God, and politics is a very important part of the world, then they must participate in political affairs because they are alive. And if they don't act neither as the leaven or the salt or the light, then things can go horribly badly wrong.
Our Christian faith is actually very subversive of the conventional notion of success - the notion that what invests a person with worth is something extrinsic.
People sometimes strive after and think they will find deep satisfaction for their psyches in wealth, sex or drugs, but then find that ultimately these things do not satisfy human longings.
Race should not be used to claim privileges and rights for one group, exclusively, which are denied other different groups. Then that is an illegitimate use of race.
Catharsis is about cleansing and healing at one and the same time - healing memories and attitudes, healing the spirit and the heart.
As a teacher in order not to have to answer too many questions, you stretch your answers.
Human beings have a vested interest in being trustworthy.
When you are in love you strive to do the things that will please your lover.
We must return to the fundamentals; the fundamentals being that you count. That is where you start from. That you count; you matter for God. That is a fantastic realization, and one that very few of us actually get to accept.
There are levels of poverty in South Africa that are totally unacceptable.
God is trying to woo us into a love affair with God.
That so called "original sin" does not know any racial discrimination.
"We can be human only together. A person is a person to other persons."
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