The church has allowed itself to get so swept up in political issues that it plays by the rules of power, which are rules of ungrace

In view of the mess we have made of crystal-clear commands--the unity of the church, love as a mark of Christians, racial and economic justice, the importance of personal purity, the dangers of wealth--I tremble to think what we would do if some of the ambiguous doctrines were less ambiguous.

Thielicke gently turned his parishioners to the example of Jesus who saw like no one else the anguish and injustice, the terror, of this planet. Shouldn't such awareness have filled his every waking hour and robbed him of sleep at night? Shouldn't it have shaken his very soul?

I leave in God's hands the scales that must balance justice and mercy.

Gary Haugen, founder of the International Justice Mission, say something similar: "God has a plan to fight injustice, and that plan is us — ?his people. There is no Plan B.

Legalism lowers, rather than raises, God's standards. Loving your neighbor as yourself, caring for the poor, bringing about justice, forgiving enemies—none of these reduces to a set of rules. Indeed, any list of rules narrows the breadth of what God wants done in the world. It moves the emphasis away from dispensing God's grace to sinners toward a pointless competition with pseudo-saints. It makes faith petty and irrelevant, not something that urgently matters.

From Jesus I learn that, whatever activism I get involved in, it must not drive out love and humility, or otherwise I betray the kingdom of heaven. The Jesus I Never Knew (244 — 45)

it seems so unfair, to forgive injustice. I am caught between forgiveness and justice.

the early discrimination laws against the Jews—the "Jews Only" shops, park benches, rest rooms, and drinking fountains—were explicitly modeled on segregation laws in the United States.

Ask the Lord to break your heart for what breaks His, and then ask Him to stir in you a sense of active compassion that makes you too uncomfortable to sit by and do nothing.

Where, sir, are the Christian and Jewish jihadists? The only Jewish state in the world is one of the freest countries on earth, with protections for minority religions and women and homosexuals unknown anywhere in the Muslim world. And virtually every free country in the world is in the Christian world.

There are far more kind and honest people than there are courageous people.