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" God is not a doormat, nor should anyone else be a doormat. "

Lewis B. Smedes

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" Common sense suggests that if no one ever judged other people, there would be no real human community. "

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" It takes one person to forgive, it takes two people to be reunited. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" Our society is pluralistic. We who accept the privilege of membership in that society agree to respect the people's right to live by their own religious precepts. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" God does not give us salvation because we believe. Our believing is only the normal way of receiving the salvation he freely gives. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" No one really forgives unless he has been hurt. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" At the cross, God was punishing Jesus for the sins of the world. God's justice required a penalty from sinners, and in his unspeakable love, he paid the penalty himself in the person of his crucified Son. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" Jesus said that we should render to the state what properly belongs to the state, and though he had taxes in mind, we might reasonably infer that giving the state the job of punishing wrongdoers is one way of giving the state its due. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" We are anxious in the face of our unchangeable past; we long to recreate segments of our private histories, but we are stuck with them. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" Our sense of fairness tells us that people should pay for the wrong they do. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" Restorative justice is not a replacement of retributive justice, but a complement. It seeks the rehabilitation of the wrongdoer and the repair of the victim's injury. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" Promise keeping is a powerful means of grace in a time when people hardly depend on each other to remember and live by their word. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" Some people still have causes they will not desert, even though the cause seems lost. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" Some people have loved ones they will not forsake, even though they are a pain in the neck. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" Forgiving is love's toughest work, and love's biggest risk. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" What is a disloyal act? A person is disloyal if he treats you as a stranger when, in fact, he belongs to you as a friend or partner. Each of us is bound to some special others by the invisible fibers of loyalty. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" Our history is an inevitable component of our being. One thing only can release us from the grip of our history. That one thing is forgiveness. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" In a sinful world, no community can exist for long where nobody is ever held accountable: no teacher would grade a student's performance; no citizen would sit on a jury or call a failed leader to account. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" Some people still make promises and keep those they make. When they do, they help make life around them more stably human. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" Retributive justice did not arise from any Christian principle; almost every pre-Christian society dealt with wrongdoers by causing them pain. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" No doubt, corporate CEOs who lie to their shareholders and politicians who lie to their public know and believe intellectually that lying is immoral. Why then do they lie? They lie to others because they first lie to themselves. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" The Holy Spirit, thank God, often enables people to forgive even though they are not sure how they did it. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" When we have been badly injured and clearly wronged, we make an instant caricature of the person who did it to us. We define him totally by the one wrong he did. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" True, the apostles did not expressly say that people will be saved only if they repent, believe, and confess. But most evangelicals assume - with good reason - that this is what the apostles implied. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" My father was only thirty-one when he died of a heart attack, much too young for a father to die and leave his young wife with five rambunctious little kids to take care of. I was the youngest. Only a couple of months old when he died. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" The right to personal privacy is precious. Without it, we are all potential victims for a prying secret police. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" Seeing reality for what it is is what we call discernment. The work of discernment is very hard. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" As I read the New Testament, I find only one path to salvation - the path of an informed faith in Jesus Christ. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" I believe that we should, on biblical grounds, tell all parents of mentally disabled children that God loves their children, regrets terribly that they are disabled, and will, when they die, carry them gently into a heavenly life where every person is forever whole. "

Lewis B. Smedes