Lewis B. Smedes Quotes
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Some people still make promises and keep those they make. When they do, they help make life around them more stably human.
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Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.
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It takes one person to forgive, it takes two people to be reunited.
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No doubt, corporate CEOs who lie to their shareholders and politicians who lie to their public know and believe intellectually that lying is immoral. Why then do they lie? They lie to others because they first lie to themselves.
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Jesus said that we should render to the state what properly belongs to the state, and though he had taxes in mind, we might reasonably infer that giving the state the job of punishing wrongdoers is one way of giving the state its due.
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Retributive justice did not arise from any Christian principle; almost every pre-Christian society dealt with wrongdoers by causing them pain.
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Modern Americans suffer from a fear of judging. Passing judgment on the behavior of fellow human beings is considered an act of medieval, undemocratic intolerance.
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At the cross, God was punishing Jesus for the sins of the world. God's justice required a penalty from sinners, and in his unspeakable love, he paid the penalty himself in the person of his crucified Son.
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I believe that we should, on biblical grounds, tell all parents of mentally disabled children that God loves their children, regrets terribly that they are disabled, and will, when they die, carry them gently into a heavenly life where every person is forever whole.
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Promise keeping is a powerful means of grace in a time when people hardly depend on each other to remember and live by their word.
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Some people still have causes they will not desert, even though the cause seems lost.
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When we have been badly injured and clearly wronged, we make an instant caricature of the person who did it to us. We define him totally by the one wrong he did.
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No one really forgives unless he has been hurt.
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The Holy Spirit, thank God, often enables people to forgive even though they are not sure how they did it.
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You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.
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Some people have loved ones they will not forsake, even though they are a pain in the neck.
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Our history is an inevitable component of our being. One thing only can release us from the grip of our history. That one thing is forgiveness.
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When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look the evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.
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God does not give us salvation because we believe. Our believing is only the normal way of receiving the salvation he freely gives.
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We are anxious in the face of our unchangeable past; we long to recreate segments of our private histories, but we are stuck with them.
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In a sinful world, no community can exist for long where nobody is ever held accountable: no teacher would grade a student's performance; no citizen would sit on a jury or call a failed leader to account.
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God is not a doormat, nor should anyone else be a doormat.
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As I read the New Testament, I find only one path to salvation - the path of an informed faith in Jesus Christ.
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Our society is pluralistic. We who accept the privilege of membership in that society agree to respect the people's right to live by their own religious precepts.