Posted by giveawayboy on September 21, 2002 at 19:53:26:
"If God punish sin, it must be merciful to punish sin ; and if God
forgive sin, it must be just to forgive sin."
"Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin ; he is bound to destroy
sin."
"It is no pleasure to God, as it so often is to us, to see the wicked
suffer. To regard any suffering with satisfaction, save it be
sympathetically with its curative quality, comes of evil, is inhuman
because undivine, is a thing God is incapable of. His nature is always
to forgive, and just because he forgives, he punishes. Because God is
so altogether alien to wrong, because it is to him a heart-pain and
trouble that one of his little ones should do the evil thing, there is,
I believe, no extreme of suffering to which, for the sake of destroying
the evil thing in them, he would not subject them. A man might flatter,
or bribe, or coax a tyrant ; but there is no refuge from the love of
God ; that love will, for verily love, insist upon the utmost farthing."
"The notion that the salvation of Jesus is a salvation from the
consequences of our sins, is a false, mean, low notion. The salvation
of Christ is salvation from the smallest tendency or leaning to sin. It
is a deliverance into the pure air of God's ways of thinking and
feeling. It is a salvation that makes the heart pure, with the will and
choice of the heart to be pure. To such a heart, sin is disgusting. It
sees a thing as it is--that is, as God sees it, for God sees everything
as it is. The soul thus saved would rather sink into the flames of hell
than steal into heaven and skulk there under the shadow of an imputed
righteousness. No soul is saved that would not prefer hell to sin.
Jesus did not die to save us from punishment ; he was called Jesus
because he should save his people from their sins."
"One chief cause of the amount of unbelief in the world is, that those
who have seen something of the glory of Christ, set themselves to
theorizing concerning him rather than to obey him."
"I believe that no man is ever condemned for any sin except one--that he
will not leave his sins and come out of them, and be the child of him
who is his father."
"I believe [...] that the true disciple shall thus always know what he
ought to do, though not necessarily what another ought to do. [...] I
believe that no teacher should strive to make men think as he thinks,
but to lead them to the living Truth, to the Master himself, of whom
alone they can learn anything, who will make them in themselves know
what is true by the very seeing of it."