Quotes about Morality

At the heart of the Ten Commandments is an Israelite's honesty about one's neighbor (Exod 20:16). At the heart of the Bible's ethic is telling the truth. Honesty mattered then and it matters now.

Torah is not theoretical morality but lived theology, a life enflamed by knowing God.

Purity is not the same as morality but is about who or what is fit for the temple, and so classifications are made.

Morality is about a heart that is right before God.

It is one thing to be judgmental; it is entirely different to say greed is wrong or that sexual sins are wrong, and saying so is not judgmentalism.

There is nothing complex about this most simple of moral maxims; its difficulty is in the doing, not in the knowing.

we must learn to distinguish moral discernment from personal condemnation.2 This distinction—the ability to know what is good from what is bad and to be able to discern the difference versus the posture of condemning another person—enables us to see what Jesus prohibits in this passage.

Fourth lesson in Bible reading: we are challenged to be better than nonfollowers. Followers are marked by a greater righteousness or by more righteousness. (Just what that more will look like can be found in the antitheses of 5:21—48.)

We stand with Calvin when it comes to the moral compass: Jesus "means that however difficult, arduous, troublesome or painful God's rule may be, we must make no excuse for that, as the righteousness of God should be worth more to us, than all the other things which are chiefly dear and precious.

John does not adjudicate how to engage in politics. Instead, John instructs Christians how to discern the moral character of governments and politicians and policies and laws.

We...sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough.

Though we live in the colony of time, we are ultimately responsible to the empire of eternity.