The truly hospitable aren't embarrassed to keep friendships with people who are different. They don't buy the world's bunk about this. They know that there is a difference between acceptance and approval, and they courageously accept and respect people who think differently from them. They don't worry that others will misinterpret their friendship. Jesus dined with sinners, but he didn't sin with sinners. Jesus lived in the world, but he didn't live like the world.
---This manipulation strategy relies on using biblical words in anti-biblical ways. It shares with biblical Christianity the same vocabulary but not the same dictionary.
---Ken and Floy Smith treaded carefully with me. Early in our friendship, Ken made the distinction between acceptance and approval. He said that he accepted me just as I was but that he did not approve. That seemed fair. But would it seem fair today?
---But Jesus knew that her sin was not her ontology: being a prostitute may have been how she was, but it was not who she was. Ontologically speaking, she was an image bearer, a child of God, chosen from before the foundations of the world and set apart for just this moment.
---God's people need to wake up to something. If you want to share the gospel with the LGBTQ community or anyone who will lose family and homes, the gospel must come with a house key. This hundredfold blessing promised here in these verses is not going to fall from the sky. It is going to come from the church. It is going to come from the people of God acting like the family of God. God intends this blessing to come from you.
---We love the miraculous stories of Jesus, his feeding of the five thousand, his divine healing, his contagious grace. And we miss the most obvious things about these stories: that we are meant to replicate them in ordinary, nonmiraculous ways.
---And back in 1 Corinthians 5, a public sinner's repentance makes Paul overjoyed. Paul knows how deep real repentance goes–how it undoes a sinner and remakes him, and how it leaves him raw, vulnerable, and transparent. I imagine Paul–years after the Lord had made him an apostle, years after his days of slaughtering Christians for religious zeal–breaking bread with a fellow believer and recognizing something in the shape of an eye, the turning up of a nose, the tone of a laugh or cry. I also imagine the horror that could have seized him, stopped him, made him gasp for breath. I can feel the recognition: that eye, that nose, that voice, so similar to someone he had murdered. Paul may have found himself at table fellowship with the children of a faithful mother he had killed in his pharisaical zeal.
Repentance changes everything. Through it, you become something you could never imagine. And repentance is a gift from God. It cannot be manufactured or faked.
---Krummacher's chapter on Judas Iscariot is especially arresting, and I have read and reread it many times. He writes something about Judas that the church needs to confront. He says: "The heathen world has no Judas, and could not produce such a character. Such a monster matures only in the radiant sphere of Christianity. He entered into too close contact with the Savior not to become entirely His or wholly Satan's." Krummacher was making the point that one should never toy with the things of God. In other words, you should never boast about a relationship with Jesus that is based on what you hope to get out of it. Dare never to get close to Jesus just for the public appearance. Never confuse knowing facts with knowing the Shepherd. It's all or nothing. Either Jesus owns your heart, or you are exalting yourself to your immanent destruction.
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