This Sunday’s readings: Matthew 5:33-37

Reflections

To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

Yes, somewhere people still make and keep promises. They choose not to quit when the going gets rough because they promised once to see it through. They stick to lost causes. They hold on to a love grown cold. They stay with people who have become pains in the neck. They still dare to make promises and care enough to keep the promises they make. I want to say to you that if you have a ship you will not desert, if you have people you will not forsake, if you have causes you will not abandon, then you are like God.
~ Lewis Smedes, 1921-2002, Author, Ethicist, Theologian

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Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a profound tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.
~ M. Scott Peck, 1936-2005, The Road Less Traveled

There are the lies of gossip … which make haters out of us; the lies of advertising … which make money out of us; the lies of politicians, who make power out of us. In other words, lies turn us from human subjects into objects to be used. Every lie demeans, destroys, and violates the dignity of the person you’re talking to.
~ Joy Davidman, 1915-1960, Poet and Writer

That children generally lie and steal and cheat is routinely observable. The fact that sometimes they grow up to become truly honest adults is what seems the more remarkable.
~ M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie

Sow a thought and you reap an act; sow an action and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, Essayist, Poet

Deep in our timid hearts is a desire to be loved mildly, nothing more. That way, we retain control, we set the terms, we avoid risk. Our loving God, in His ferocious intensity, will have none of it.
~ Ray Ortlund, pastor and author

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
~ Daniel Boorstin (1914-2004), historian at the University of Chicago


Americans have…a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative. …Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our…fellow Americans use it.
~ Kurt Anderson in “How America Lost Its Mind”, Atlantic Monthly


I don’t want you to be safe, ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe, emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity.
~ Anthony Kapel Jones, American Commentator


Discipleship is not an offer that man makes to Christ. … When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship


Kichijiro: ‘Where is the place for a weak person in the world we’re in? Why wasn’t I born when there wasn’t any persecution? I would have been a great Christian.’
~ The Martin Scorsese film “Silence”