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.
Jesus resolved the false opposition between obedience and freedom and opened the path to freedom
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
Ever man is eternally alone. But when you get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the acute symptoms of its disease - that of thinking.
If one by one we counted people out
Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls - while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.
Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky.
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