Don’t you see the chains?
“I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves.”
- Harriet Tubman
Archive for the 'Incisive Quotes' Category
Do as you like.
“Love God, and do as you like, say the free spirits. Yes; but as long as you like anything contrary to God’s will, you do not love Him.”
Well, are you satisfied?
“He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor, his life for love, knowing that contentment is the shadow not the light. The great yearning that sweeps eternity is a yearning to praise, a yearning to serve. And when the waves of that yearning swell in our souls all the barriers are pushed aside: the crust of callousness, the hysteria of vanity, the orgies of arrogance.”
- Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone
Do you dare?
“Only those who have dared to let go can dare to reenter.”
Utmost importance
“God is of no importance unless He is of utmost importance.”
The root of all knowledge?
“Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.”
Plague-proofing your city
“If the good Lord sent the ten plagues of Egypt on New York City, I don’t think New York would even notice.”
- From a Garrison Keillor sketch
Jesus would be horrified.
Much is made in churches of the “good news” of the gospels. Less is said of the gospel’s bad news, which is that Jesus would have been horrified by just about every “Christian” government the world has ever seen. He would be horrified by our government and its works, and it would be horrified by him.
- Wendell Berry, Christianity and The Survival of Creation
Pentecostal pacifism
“From the very beginning the movement has been characterized by Quaker principles. The laws of the Kingdom, laid down by our elder brother, Jesus Christ in His Sermon on the Mount, have been unqualifiedly adopted, consequently the movement has found itself opposed to the spilling of the blood of any man, or of offering resistance to any aggression. Every branch of the movement, whether in the United States, Canada, Great Britain or Germany, has held to this principle.”
– Stanley Frodsham, General Secretary of the Assemblies of God, 1917
Quoted in Historical and Theological Origins of Assemblies of God Pacifism by Paul Alexander
Love our enemies or die
“In the face of all-annihilating weapons, the natural next step may be the use of no weapons. It may be the only possibly effective defense against the ultimate weapon is no weapon at all. It may be that the presence of nuclear weapons in the world serves notice that the command to love one another is an absolute practical necessity, such as we never dreamed it to be before, and that our choice is not to win or lose, but to love our enemies or die.”
– Wendell Berry, Property, Patriotism and National Defense
