The light of our life, our sole, eternal joy, is simply God, and all his creatures in him. He is all in all; not to be true to anything he has made is to be untrue to him. To be in God is to know him and need no law...
The man who steps out of the darkness and turns to the light is not yet thoroughly righteous, but is growing in righteousness. He needs creative God, and time for will and effort. ..
The Bible never deals with impossibilities, never demands of any man at any given moment a righteousness of which he is incapable; neither does it lay upon him any other law than that of perfect righteousness...
The very act of believing in God after such fashion that, when the time of action comes, the man will obey God, is the highest act, the deepest , loftiest righteousness of which man is capable...
Be sure that the thing that God gives, the righteousness that is of God, is a real thing, and not a contemptible legalism. Pray God I have no righteousness imputed to me. Let me be regarded as the sinner I am; for nothing will serve my need but to be made a righteous man, one that will no more sin.
To those who call themselves Christians, but weep such hopeless tears: do you not believe that God is unchangeable, but think he acts one way one time and another way another time just from caprice?
God may forgive and punish; and he may punish and not forgive, that he may rescue. To forgive the sin against the holy spirit would be to damn the universe to the pit of lies, to render it impossible for the man so forgiven ever to be saved...
He who chooses to go on sinning annihilates my forgiveness. If a man refuses to come out of his sin, he must suffer the vengeance of a love that would be no love if it left him there...
It does not follow, because light has come into the world, that it has fallen upon this or that man. He has his portion of the light that lighteth every man, but the revelation of God in Christ may not yet have reached him...
It may sound paradoxical, but no man is condemned for anything he has done; he is condemned for continuing to do wrong. He is condemned for not coming out of the darkness, for not coming to the light...
Do not try to believe anything that affects thee as darkness. Even if thou mistake and refuse something true thereby, thou wilt do less wrong to Christ by such a refusal than thou wouldst by accepting as his what thou canst see only as darkness...
Come to God, then, my brother, my sister, with all thy desires and instincts, all thy lofty ideals, all thy longing for purity and unselfishness, all thy yearning to love and be true...
All men will not, in our present imperfection, see the same light; but light is light notwithstanding, and what each does see, is his safety if he obeys it...
Where would the good news be if John said, “God is light, but you cannot see his light; you cannot tell, you have no notion, what light is; what God means by light, is not what you mean by light; what God calls light may be horrible darkness to you...
Too many regard the father of their spirits as their governor! They yield the idea of the Ancient of Days, “the glad creator,” and put in its stead a miserable, puritanical martinet of a God...
It may be asked of me, “Do I believe that the sufferings of Christ, as sufferings, justified the supreme ruler in doing anything which he would not have been at liberty to do but for those sufferings?” I do not...