“John the Baptist did not come out of the wilderness issuing invitations to seminars.”
Would Rather Not Decide
“If some profoundly needs to continue on with his conviction that we are the end product of so many millennia of blind evolution, and you obligate him to acknowledge a Creator God, the only two alternatives are anger or repentance. He does not want to stand at a that crossroads, and so he lashes out at the person who brought him there.”
Risky Safety
“Adam was in a momentous conflict before he sinned. God insists that we bet with real money. God requires us to risk things. This risk includes all that we hold dear, and to shrink back from it is to incur the displeasure of God. The wicked and lazy servant was the one who would not risk what had been entrusted to him. To play it safe is to play it dangerous.”
No Such Thing as Bad Words, p. 76
Rightly Ordered Hatred
“The shepherd must hate the wolves because he loves the sheep. If he hates the wolves because he loves to hate, then he is a wolf himself.”
No Such Thing as Bad Words, p. 75
Priorities
“Righteousness is more important than victory, and victory will only come to those who care about righteousness more than victory.”
No Such Thing as Bad Words, p. 74
All the Rest of It
“No reformation worth having was ever accomplished to the sound of polite applause in the background. There will be smoke, and thunder, and yelling, and all the rest of it.”
No Such Thing as Bad Words, p. 73
Merry and Terrible
“We may fight with abandon because we are not abandoned. Fatalistic warriors can be grim and fell, but never merry.”
No Such Thing as Bad Words, p. 71
One or the Other
“Some of these principles nest within others, like Russian dolls. Some of them do not—like dolls that aren’t Russian dolls.”
No Such Thing as Bad Words, p. 70
A Surprise Strategy
“But Paul doesn’t tell us to fight dirty jokes with clean jokes, lame or not. He says to fight dirty jokes with contentment and gratitude.”
No Such Thing as Bad Words, p. 66
Making and Having
“All of this is one of the reasons why more than a few readers constantly assume that I am always making fun of them. This is because they belong to a different tradition, that, say, of stuffing all the shirts, and they have trouble distinguishing a man who is making fun from a man who is just having fun.”
No Such Thing as Bad Words, p. 57