This Sunday’s readings: Luke 14:25-27

Reflections

Reading: C.S. Lewis excerpt, Counting the Cost

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So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

The believer’s cross is no longer any and every kind of suffering, sickness, or tension, the bearing of which is demanded. The believer’s cross must be, like his Lord’s, the price of his social nonconformity. It is not, like sickness or catastrophe, an inexplicable, unpredictable suffering; it is the end of the path freely chosen after counting the cost. It is not, like Luther’s or Thomas Muntzer’s or Zinzendorf’s or Kierkegaard’s cross, an inward wrestling of the sensitive soul with self and sin; it is the social reality of representing in an unwilling world the Order to come.
~ John Howard, 1939- , former Australian politician

I think too often people, even Christians, really short-change what salvation really is about. We picture it as really nothing more than us walking on streets of gold in white robes, and always smiling…but still being our puny little selves, just a bit cleaner. Needless to say, I don’t think we really grasp what God is up to.
~ Joel Edmund Anderson, from blogpost, Nov 14, 2015, counting the cost

We are not sent into this world mainly to enjoy the loveliness therein, nor to sit us down in passive ease; no, we were sent here for action. The soul that seeks to do the will of God with a pure heart, fervently, does not yield to the lethargy of ease.
~ Dorothea Dix, 1802-1887, nurse, advocate for mentally ill

Let us think often that our only business in this life is to please God. Perhaps all besides is but folly and vanity.
~ Brother Lawrence, 1614-1691, lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in Paris

The thing at bottom is this, that men have low thoughts of God, and high thoughts of themselves; and therefore it is that they look upon God as having so little right, and they so much.
~ Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758, New England pastor and theologian

This Sunday’s readings: Matthew 12:30-32

Reflections

Of course God will forgive me; that’s His job.
~ Heinrich Heine, 1797-1856, German literary critic, writer

Those who think they are healthy but have a hidden moral cancer are incurable; the sick who want to be healed have a chance. All denial of guilt keeps people out of the area of love and, by inducing self-righteousness, prevents a cure. The two facts of healing in the physical order are these: A physician cannot heal us unless we put ourselves into his hands, and we will not put ourselves into his hands unless we know that we are sick.
~ Fulton J. Sheen, 1895-1979, American Catholic archbishop

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That we are capable, only of being what we are, remains our unforgivable sin.
~ Gene Wolfe, 1931-2019, Am. Author, The Claw of the Conciliator

Christian tradition thinks of genuine repentance not as a human possibility but as a gift of God. It is not just that we do not like being wrong, but that almost invariably the others are not completely right either. As Carl Gustav Jung observed after World War II, most confessions come as a mixture of repentance, self-defense, and even some lust for revenge. We admit wrongdoing, justify ourselves, and attack, all in one breath.
~ Miroslav Volf, 1956- , Theologian/Author

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.
~ James Baldwin, 1924-1987, Author, Notes of a Native Son

Forgiveness is an outrage against straight-line dues-paying morality.
~ Lewis Smedes, 1921-2002, Author, Forgive and Forget

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know. It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence…. No philosophy is completely disinterested.
~ Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963, English writer, Philosopher