The modern age has perfected means but confused ends. Albert Einstein
One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us and it is either directed somewhere into the world or into another.
We should look at every human relationship as a tool for character formation.
I could summarize my entire spiritual pilgrimage as an effort to move the operating center from myself to God.
Jesus reserved his hardest words for the hidden sins of hypocrisy, pride, greed and legalism.
Greed is the economic engine of our nation, and indeed the world. It depends on a constant sense of discontent that motivates each consumer to desire even more.
Pride is a kind of addiction, a yearning for ego strokes that will never be satisfied.
Jesus concern over the seductive power of greed shows in the fact that 1/6th of his sayings in the Gospels center on money and its dangers. He spoke about money more than anything else. He realized it is the most sought after value in the world.
There is in each of us a hard core of pride or self-centeredness which corrupts our best achievements and blights our best experiences. It comes out in all sorts of ways—in the jealousy which spoils our friendships, in the vanity we feel when we have done something pretty good, in the easy conversion of love into lust, in the meanness which makes us depreciate the efforts of other people, in the distortion of our own judgment by our own self-interest, in our fondness for flattery and our resentment of blame, in our self-assertive profession of fine ideals which we never begin to practice. Malcolm Muggeridge
In many ways, sin is the punishment for sin. The more I choose against God’s design and give in to my sinful desires, the more I suffer even if I never get caught, even if no one else knows.
When other people commit sins, you are startled, but when you commit them yourself they seem absolutely natural.
Guilt is the early warning sign to danger, the first rumor of something wrong.
Guilt reminds us of our place as moral beings accountable to God. True guilt occurs when a person doesn’t measure up to God’s standards. False guilt occurs when a person punishes himself for not measuring up to someone else’s standards—perhaps parents, church’s or society’s.
A saint is just a sinner who is more repentant than most of us.
AA Theme: You are as sick as your sickest secret and you will remain sick as long as it remains a secret.
By humbly accepting my place as a flawed creature in God’s world, I get a tiny glimpse of God’s point of view. I see at a glance how my sins stunt growth and threaten health. In the same act, I acknowledge the disease and ask for the cure. CS Lewis
The central message of the Bible is RESCUE. God is in the rescue business.
It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of his presence. CS Lewis
Aim at heaven and you get earth thrown in, aim at earth and you get neither. CS Lewis
When the chess game is over the pawns, rooks, kings and queens all go back into the same box.
If you read history you will find out that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. CS Lewis
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience we are spiritual beings having a human experience. We are incomplete beings awaiting a complete experience.
Give us weak eyes for things of no eternal value. Soren Kierkegaard
Life consists in more than the years we spend on earth, and reality consists in more than we can see with telescopes and microscopes.
Do all of your work as if you had 1,000 years to live, and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.