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" 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

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" 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

" 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

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

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

" Nobody sees reality whole; we all need others to show us the parts of it that they see better than we do. Nobody sees reality with total accuracy; we all need others to correct our own vision. "

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

" The lies we tell ourselves are the most subtle of all lies. "

Lewis B. Smedes

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

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

" When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look the evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it. "

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

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

Lewis B. Smedes

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

Lewis B. Smedes

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

Lewis B. Smedes

" Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future. "

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

" 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

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

Lewis B. Smedes

" The blood of Christ covers all of our sins, but each of us must do personal business with God in order to experience his forgiveness. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" Nothing is more private than a woman's body; it is her physical, emotional, and moral citadel. She cannot be free at all if she is not free to decide for herself, in private, what to do with her body. "

Lewis B. Smedes

" The problem with revenge is that it never evens the score. It ties both the injured and the injurer to an escalator of pain. Both are stuck on the escalator as long as parity is demanded, and the escalator never stops. "

Lewis B. Smedes

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

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

" 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

" 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

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

Lewis B. Smedes

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

Lewis B. Smedes

" Any lazy or biased fool can have opinions; making judgments is the hard work of responsible and compassionate people. "

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

" 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