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?
When any have husband, son, father, brother, or lover are taken from them, is it but the cold frost of use and forgetting that makes them less miserable than they were a year ago?
It was hard upon Lazarus, but he must come and bear the Lord company a little longer, and then be left behind with his sisters, that they and millions more might know that God is the God of the living, and not of the dead...
The trouble of the Lord was that his friends would not trust his father. He did not want any reception of himself that was not a reception of his father—hewho did the works!
They wept as those who believe in death, not in life. What was to be done with his brother and sisters who would be miserable, who would not believe in his father!
The Lord had all this time been trying to teach his friends about his father, who had sent him that men might look on his very likeness, and all they had gained by it seemed not to amount to an atom of consolation when the touch of death came...
[The Lord] had wanted to give the man something so much better than a pure skin, and had only roused in him an unseemly delight in his own cleanness...
Jesus had cured the leper—not with his word only, which would have been enough for the mere cure, but was not enough without the touch of his hand to satisfy the heart of Jesus—a touch defiling him, in the notion of the Jews, but how cleansing to the sense of the leper!
The anger of a good man is a very different thing from the anger of a bad man; the displeasure of Jesus must be a very different thing from the displeasure of a tyrant. But they are both anger, both displeasure, nevertheless...
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...
