It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.
Interpretation
True zeal requires self-reflection and confrontation of one's own faults rather than solely judging others.
In this quote, D. A. Carson criticizes a superficial form of zeal that focuses only on condemning the flaws and sins of others. He emphasizes the importance of introspection, suggesting that genuine zeal should involve recognizing and battling one's own temptations and shortcomings, rather than merely pointing out those of others. This idea underlines a deeper ethical responsibility to cultivate self-awareness and personal integrity.
In practice
During a church sermon discussing moral accountability.
Both God's love and God's wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax - in the cross.
Many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.
There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.
The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.
Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.
Imagination is a God-given gift; but if it is fed dirt by the eye, it will be dirty. All sin, not least sexual sin, begins with the imagination. Therefore what feeds the imagination is of maximum importance in the pursuit of kingdom righteousness.
The compass of compassion asks not what is good for me? but what is good? Not what is best for me but what is best. Not what is right for me but what is right. Not how much can we take? but How much ought we leave? and how much might we give? Not what is easy but what is worthy. Not what is practical but what is moral.
After the Manchu government had carried on wars with foreign nations and had been defeated, China was forced to sign many unequal treaties. Foreign nations are still using these treaties to bind China, and as a result, China fails at whatever she attempts.
What if the counterculture was only a stumbling beginning, rather than the best that could be hoped for?
One of the challenges Christians confront is how the politics we helped create has made it difficult to sustain the material practices constitutive of an ecclesial culture to produce Christians.
What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?
I like people. I like animals, too-whales and quail, dinosaurs and dodos. But I like human beings especially, and I am unhappy that the pool of human germ plasm, which determines the nature of the human race, is deteriorating.
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