Category: ⛪️ Faith
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A day of resting is the visible sign that a person lives from the grace of God and not from works.
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Human beings who have been reduced to machines and have been exhausted need rest so that their thoughts can clear, their feelings purified, and their desires be oriented anew.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment -
We need good liturgies, and we need natural ones: we need a life neither patternless nor over patterned, if the city is to be built. And I think the root of it all is caring. Not that that will turn the trick all by itself, but that we can produce nothing good without it. True liturgies take things for what they really are, and offer them up in loving delight.
Robert Farrar Capon, Bread and Board -
At some thoughts one stands perplexed, above all the sight of human sin, and wonders whether to combat it by force or humble love. Always decide ‘I will combat it by humble love.’ If you resolve on that once and for all, you can conquer the whole world. Loving humility is a terrible force: it is the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov -
I decided it was more important to enjoy life because the best thing people can do in this life is to eat, drink, and enjoy life. At least that will help people enjoy the hard work God gave them to do during their life on earth.
Ecclesiastes 8:15 -
Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labour on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare.
Isaiah 55:2 -
I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:17-19 -
While the words aren’t a magical formula – the “proper” words could be uttered with no forgiveness transpiring – I am convinced that it matters to utter them. To say “I apologize” or “I forgive you” is to carry out a speech act, not unlike saying “I do” or “I promise”. The words accomplish the thing they say in the saying of them. Just as the Lord says, “Let there be” and reality comes to be, just as the words “I do” or “I promise” bring a new family into existence, so saying “I’m sorry” and “I forgive you” seem to reach down into the stuff of the universe and shift it toward something more and new.
Ester Lightcap Meek, Forgiveness -
When Jesus desires baptism, he does it as the sole good one, the one without sin, the one who does not need forgiveness, different from all human beings. As the good one, he desires baptism, even though he does not need it for himself, for the sake of those who need it, for the sake of sinners. Precisely because he is the sole good one, he doesn’t allow himself to be separated from sinners; he does not become a Pharisee who wants to claim what is good for himself. The sinlessness, the goodness of Jesus, is attested precisely in his unconditional love for sinners. Jesus goes to baptism not out of penitence but out of love and in this way takes the side of sinners.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Meditation on Epiphany, January 1940 -
What sort of baptism is this, when the one who is dipped is purer than the font, and where the water that soaks the one whom it has received is not dirtied but honored with blessings? What sort of baptism is this of the Savior, I ask, in which the streams are made pure more than they purify? For by a new kind of consecration the water does not so much wash Christ as submit to being washed.
St. Maximus of Turin, Sermon 13A -
Somehow Jesus wanted his followers to live with the tension of believing that the kingdom was indeed arriving in and through his own work, and that this kingdom would come, fully arrive, not all in a bang but through a process like the slow growth of a plant or the steady leavening of a loaf.
N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 1