Five Faces of Faith (or Un-Faith)

1. The Doubting Disciples - “Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?” Mark 4:40
2. The Pushy Patient - “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be healed of your affliction.” Mark 5:34
3. The Grieving Father - “Do not be afraid any longer, only believe.” Mark 5:36
4. The Offended Neighbors - “And He wondered at their unbelief.” Mark 6:6

Yesterday in our Sunday morning Bible study we read all of the various stories of Jesus’ ministry in which He makes these statements about faith. We identified the statements, and listed them like you see them above, and then I asked: “What is faith? Give me a definition.”

An enthusiastic answer from the couch to my left: “It’s believing in something that can’t necessarily be proved.”

Boom. Right there. An excellent answer, and quite articulate for a Sunday morning crowd. And it’s a correct answer – as far as the modern world is concerned. This is the definition of faith that everyone seems to take for granted, and accept as true. People of faith accept this definition and defend it based on the authority of tradition and personal religious experience. People who are skeptical or openly critical of faith take this as Exhibit A that faith has no place in a world based on the concrete foundation of empirical proof, the bedrock of hypotheses, test, repeat.

The only problem with that definition is that, biblically speaking, that’s not what faith is.

We think “faith,” and instantly think of mental assent to propositions. We say “believe” and think “accept as truth.” Faith, we think, is a word about thinking. It’s a word about ideas. It is in the same way that most things involving humans are about ideas, but it’s also about more than that.

The Greek word for faith is pistuo. We translate it in English as “faith,” “belief,” …and “faithful.” Ultimately, it’s more a word about trust than about mental assent to propositions. It’s more about loyalty than lists of systematic theology. It is the commitment to something or someone - the aligning of your life around a person, or cause, or goal. Biblically, speaking, that’s faith. It’s a word about trust that leads to action, specifically the actions that define the direction of your life.

Belief, our modern world tells us, should be based on evidence – testing and building an airtight case. But what is trust based on? Or what is loyalty based on? Past experience, we might say - both our own experience and those with whom we identify as our community. Trust might also be based on hope for the future – that the best intention of a person is worthy of our commitment. But is there ever an airtight case for trust? Doesn’t it always involve risk? Belief, in the modern conception, requires evidential proof. But trust, in any age, requires a leap.

Look at the verses above (and, as always for greater understanding, look at the context in which they were said).
Faith is:
In contrast to fear
A motivator for action – specifically, the action of healing or deliverance
Conversely, its lack prevents such action

Everyone has faith, biblically speaking. Whether it’s in yourself or another person, or money, or power, or something more ineffable and intangible. You align your life around some sort of center. The question is, do you have faith/trust/loyalty in something or someone that deserves it?

This new/old definition of faith does not necessarily solve any problems between God and man – it may just pose different questions.

Faith/trust/loyalty can be naïve, can be misplaced, and can be betrayed. You might be surprised at how much of the Bible deals with the question of whether God is worthy of such faith/trust/loyalty. These questions about God often have to do with issues of justice. We should not be surprised that the ministry of Jesus was much concerned with others’ faith/trust/loyalty in Him as God’s representative, including the faith/trust/loyalty (or lack thereof) of his own disciples. It may just be that Jesus’ life was meant to be an answer to the question of the justice of God.

This definition of faith also affects what we think about “doubt.” If faith is about trust, then doubt is not just being unsure of propositions or positive statements of mental assent, it is the state of not being sure who or what to trust, or what to be loyal to. It also means that one can be a doubter and still be a person attempting to have faith, trying to trust, trying to be loyal, trying to be faithful. It could mean there is a place for doubters on the Way of Faith, walking as faithfully as possible, but not entirely sure they are on the right road. There is room on the Way for those walking in obedience, but scratching their heads at the same time.

What do you have faith in? What’s at the center of your life? What are you depending on to catch you when you jump into the unknown? Is it worthy of your trust?

5. The Frantic Father - I think the most honest prayer in the Bible is the prayer of the father in Mark 9:24. “I do believe; help my unbelief.”

I trust You. Help my mistrust. I am loyal to You. Help me not to be disloyal. I have faith. Help my un-faith.

Bible Verses That Freak Me Out #28 - Philippians 4:13 - "I can do all things through Him..."

Back in the blog saddle with a return to the classics! Today’s Bible verse that freaks me out comes courtesy of the apostle Paul, in my favorite New Testament letter!

“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” – Philippians 4:13

Boo yah. Through Jesus I am well-nigh invincible. Brimming with power. Clearly, if this verse means nothing else, it means that God wants whatever sports team I play on to win, and if I am called on to perform some semi-mythical feat to do it, I CAN.

60-yard field goal here I come.



Wait, what’s that? I might want to check the context? Mmmmm, I don’t know. That’s risky. All right, I suppose…

“I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need. I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.” – Philippians 4:11-13

Well. That’s a little different, isn’t it? A bit more challenging. “I have learned to be content,” says the man in prison for preaching the gospel.



Earlier in the letter he says, “To live is Christ and to die is gain.” (Phil. 1:21)

It’s not that God cares about my football game one way or the other, it’s that I should care about the work of God, and being within and doing the will of God. You can’t threaten a man who isn’t afraid of death. There’s no leverage against a person who views the loss of his personal freedoms, or his life, as a trifle compared to the ongoing expansion of the kingdom of God.

And did you notice that Paul had to learn to be content in prosperity and in being filled? We have the deep seated myth in our culture that abundance equals contentment, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Whether in abundance or in need we can do all things – especially that most elusive of things, being content - through Him who strengthens us.

What I Did On My Summer Blogcation

Well, hello, blogosphere! It’s been quite a while since we last connected. I haven’t forgotten you – I’ve just been a little busy. June was month 9 of Jeni’s pregnancy, and July saw the arrival of Sheridan Danielle Adair, now three weeks old.

We have been tremendously blessed by the love and generosity of our family and friends both in helping us prepare for Sheridan, and after her arrival. It has been a blast to have people meet her. We haven’t known each other long, but in my opinion, she is the most beautiful baby in the world.

Ways she is like her dad: She is very hungry. She likes late evenings and sleeping late in the morning. She has enormous feet and long legs.

Ways she is like her mom: She is beautiful. She furrows her brow when trying to figure things out. She likes meeting new people. She looks good in a dress. She was the exact same weight and number of days late as her mother. She looks very, very much like the baby pictures of her mom. This bodes well for the future.

She is still a newborn, running mostly on instinct, and I am looking forward to getting to know her personality, and reading “Hippos Go Berserk” together.

There is a part of me that feels a little bad for not really having any deep spiritual insight to share about the birth of my daughter. But things can be deep in different ways. I am overwhelmingly grateful every day for the health of my wife and my daughter. I am amazed every day at the sheer fact of her existence. I suppose that’s not “deep” or profound in the sense that it requires a lot of mental gymnastics to comprehend. It’s deep and profound in the classic sense – seemingly inexhaustible, larger than one is able to take in at one viewing, or one thousand.

Sermon: The Work of the Holy Spirit (aka The One Where I Made the Congregation Talk Like Arnold Schwarzenegger)

Know what this Sunday is? That's right - Pentecost Sunday!

This is a sermon from a few years back on the red-headed step-child of the Trinity (at least for Baptists), the Holy Spirit! So, it's going to be a little long - but it has pictures!
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This morning we are going to talk about the Holy Spirit. It would be an interesting exercise to go around the room and take a survey of your initial reactions to that topic. What emotion or thought first passed through your head at the mention of the Spirit? Was it excitement? Nervousness? A sense of mystery? Concern? Talking about the Holy Spirit tends to be a divisive topic, a topic that polarizes people. The Bible tells us that the Holy Spirit is the reason for the unity that we have, or should have with other believers, and so it is deeply ironic and terribly tragic that beliefs about the Holy Spirit should divide us.

I think there are three major reasons that some of us get nervous at the idea of talking about the Holy Spirit. One reason is that as citizens of the United States we live in a society and within a worldview that has very little place for the concept of "supernatural" events intruding on our daily lives. In some areas of the world, and in the biblical world, this is not the case, but in the U.S. we like things we can accurately label, measure, and quantify. We like things that are tangible, controllable, and predictable, and the Holy Spirit is none of those things. Even for those of us who believe very strongly in God, and in our personal relationship with Jesus Christ, the idea that there are unseen, spiritual forces at work in our lives and the world around us feels foreign at best, and culturally backwards at worst. Nobody in our culture wants to be seen as naïve or superstitious, so the Holy Spirit tends to make people nervous.

Another reason for nervousness about the Holy Spirit is that, by nature, the Spirit is difficult to picture. Jesus, we feel like we have a handle on. However inaccurate, most of still see the gray-haired, bearded figure from Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel as our stand-in for God,

but the Holy Spirit? The closest we can get is a dove, or a tongue of fire, whatever that looks like. There are dozens of famous artistic depictions of God, thousands of Christ, and the Holy Spirit has…a clip art dove?

I think it is very difficult for us to feel like we know a person that we cannot see in our minds’ eye in some way.

A third reason that the Holy Spirit makes us nervous is that those of our Christian brothers and sisters who tend to speak most passionately about the Holy Spirit usually worship in a way that makes us nervous. I am speaking about our Pentecostal brothers and sisters. Most of us in this room today likely do not come form a Pentecostal background, or have had limited experience with such, and so tend to see Pentecostal worship as …rowdy, unusual, uncomfortable? Our Pentecostal brothers and sisters associate the Holy Spirit with practices in worship that are foreign to many of us, and I am thinking primarily of speaking in tongues.

Did you feel that? Did you feel the collective temperature of the room rise just a little bit there? Amazing isn’t it? We are going to chase a small rabbit here for a minute. I want to read two verses to you that might blow your mind a little bit, if you haven’t read them in a while, and then move on. You don’t have to turn there, the verses are 1 Corinthians 14:18-19. Paul is writing to the church at Corinth and says: “I thank God I speak in tongues more than you all; however, in the church I desire to speak five words with my mind so that I may instruct others also, rather than ten thousands words in a tongue.” We are not going to go into detail about speaking in tongues today – we are going to talk about the Holy Spirit - if you want to talk to me about tongues later, fine or just read 1 Corinthians – Paul really spells it out pretty clearly there, I just wanted to say that when you talk about people who speak in tongues, remember you are talking about the apostle Paul.

That rabbit has been chased, and we are now back on track. There are many reasons why talking about the Holy Spirit might make us nervous, but there is something that we cannot escape, and that is, according to the Bible, the Holy Spirit is absolutely indispensable to anyone who calls themselves a Christian. It is therefore indispensable for us as Christians to do our best to understand the Holy Spirit in spite of our limitations of imagination, and to understand what the Spirit does in our lives. If we cannot fully picture the Holy Spirit, that’s okay. Do you really want a God that fits completely in your frame of reference? But we must understand what the Holy Spirit is doing in our Christian lives. There are so many things we could talk about, but I want to focus on three things.

Look with me at Ephesians chapter 1. Paul here is writing to the church at Ephesus, and he opens with an extended blessing of God beginning in verse three. We are going to read 3-14 for the context, and Paul is going to drop a lot of theology on us, but I want you to focus on the role of the Spirit in verses 13-14.

3Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ,
4just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love
5He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will,
6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in (S)the Beloved.
7In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace
8which He lavished on us. In all wisdom and insight
9He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him
10 with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. In Him
11also we (have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will,
12to the end that we who were the first to hope in Christ would be to the praise of His glory.
13In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation--having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise,
14who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God's own possession, to the praise of His glory.

The Holy Spirit is a pledge of inheritance, and as I told the children, a seal. Our experience with the Holy Spirit is God’s guarantee in the present day of His promises for the future, as well as His mark on our lives. The Holy Spirit is the power that enables us to sense the presence of God in whatever way that you sense it. The Holy Spirit is our promise that presence is for today and forever. Christ calls the Spirit the Comforter – and what could be more comforting than knowing that the promises of God are true?

The presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives also reminds us that God has already begun to fulfill his promises. The Old Testament prophets said that in the new age God would put his Spirit on everyone who believed. We are part of that! We are in the new age, the age of the kingdom! It is not yet completed, but it has begun! You are probably are not used to thinking of your life this way, so let me spell it out a bit more. The people of Jesus’ day believed that they were living in an age of evil, and that it was characterized by: death, war, sickness, demonic activity, and sin. They believed that when the Messiah came and started the new age, it would be marked by just the opposite; life, peace, health, the presence of God, and the will of God done on earth. Look at the life of Jesus and the activity of the early church in that light. Jesus raised the dead, and the church preached resurrection, Jesus said turn the other cheek, and the early church taught that we were to live in peace with all men. Jesus healed, the early church healed. Jesus cast out demons and said he would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire, the early church believed that they were experiencing the presence of God in their lives in a way no one had before. Read the New Testament with that in mind, and you cannot help but notice that the Christians believed they were living something unprecedented, and that the Holy Spirit was responsible.

That is on the macro level, that is the big picture of what the Holy Spirit is doing – remaking the world into the world God wants. What does that mean for you personally. Turn over to Ephesians 3. Starting in verse 14, Paul prays for the Ephesians – pay particular attention to verse 16.

14For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,
15from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name,
16that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man...

The coming of the Holy Spirit is the sign that God has begun to fulfill his promise to remake the world in general, and the Holy Spirit is remaking you in particular. “Strengthened with power in the inner man so that Christ may dwell in your hearts” that’s Paul’s flowery way of saying the Holy Spirit is making your heart like the heart of Jesus, so that your life will be like Christ’s life. As Jesus was about life, peace, health, and doing the will of God, the Holy Spirit serves to make your life about those things

There’s a word that seems to always be close by in the New Testament when anyone is talking about the Holy Spirit, and Ephesians 3:16 is no exception. The word is “power.” At its most general, power is the ability to do something. In the case of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit provides us as Christians with the power to do the will of God. With apologies to Norman Vincent Peale, the power of positive thinking is nothing compared to the power of the Spirit of God. And that is the power which is at work in every believer. The Holy Spirit is God’s active agent in making the impossible possible. If God wants something done on earth, the Holy Spirit is all over it. And if God wants something done through you, the Holy Spirit is going to be all over you. That is especially true of seemingly impossible tasks. God is not bothered by those, by the way. Whatever has you stressed today, just know that God is not stressed about it. He is not in heaven biting his nails saying, “I have no idea how I’m going to handle that.” He has an idea! And he wants to use His Holy Spirit to help you handle it in the way that he wants. Has God called you to do something? You have no idea of the power you have available to you. God has given you already everything you need to make it through, and to overwhelmingly conquer in the person of His Spirit.

Of all the seemingly impossible things that the Holy Spirit was responsible for in the New Testament, the most amazing to me is the fact that anyone believed the gospel at all, especially outside of Israel. Imagine being a Jewish Christian, going to a Greek city to preach the gospel! Yet God, through His Holy Spirit, brought our ancestors in the faith to him. Nothing is impossible with him, and the same power at work then is at work in you. The Holy Spirit is God’s Spirit – it is a Spirit of power!! Look at 2 Timothy 1:7.

7For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and self-discipline.

A Spirit of power, love, and self-discipline! I had the privilege this summer of being the camp pastor at Mission Waco’s overnight camp for their kids in their summer program, and I taught them this verse. And I taught it to them in a way that helped them remember it to this day. I taught them to say this verse like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I think that is the only way you can really get the feeling Paul is going for here. You have to say it and think about it in the most unconquerable frame of mind you can get into. Now, I debated whether to teach it you this way. I wondered if it was appropriate for Sunday morning, but ultimately I decided that if I taught you how to say it correctly, you would probably never forget it, and that when you feel afraid you would remember this and trust that the Spirit of the Living God is at work in your life. So, release your inhibitions, and repeat after me: GOD HAS NOT GIVEN US A SPIRIT OF FEAR, BUT OF POWER, OF LOVE, AND SELF-DISCIPLINE!! Now you will never forget this verse!!

God has given us his Spirit as proof that he keeps his promises. God has given us his Spirit so that we can be about life, peace, health, and doing his will. God has given us his Spirit to enable us to do what he has called us to do. God will not leave you in the lurch! He has called you, and he has given you His own Spirit to do what seems impossible to you today!! I don’t know exactly how you will experience the work of the Holy Spirit in your life, but I know how you will know it has been happening. You will know the Holy Spirit has been working in your life when you see you have become more like Christ in your priorities, your thoughts, and in your actions. God has not given us a Spirit of fear – so do not be afraid. God has given us a spirit of power – so do what He has called you to do, believing that nothing is impossible for Him. The Spirit of God is in you, working to fulfill God’s call on your life, and to make you more like Christ!!

The Failure of the English Language

Yesterday I mowed my yard. I also used the weedeater. But see, there's the problem.
Noun: mower. Verb: mow. Present tense: mow. Past tense: mowed.

Noun: weedeater.
Verb: weedeat?
Present tense: weedeat? It's time to weedeat.
Past tense: weedate? weedeatered? ate weeds? Yesterday I mowed and ate weeds.

The mind boggles.

This guy probably has the same problem, though:


Anteat? Anteatered? Ate ants?

Around the Office: Hats

I really like hats. I don’t really wear hats that often, but I like having them around. There are certain situations where you need a special kind of hat, and it is a great joy to be able to put that needed hat on.

I have a lot of shelves in my office, and I had a great brainstorm one day and put all my collected haberdashery around the top level. I have more at home, but these are my display hats, and their stories, left to right from my computer chair.

A bear hat that I got from my sister. This is probably my current favorite. It comes in handy for Baylor parades and sporting events.


A Hawaii ball cap I got from my in-laws from their Hawaii trip.

A Home Depot hat (the kind with the giant top part that farmers and elderly men wear) that Scott Eberle gave me from his time at said depot.

A sombrero I won at Six Flags in high school for “fooling the guesser” (he overestimated my weight – my scrawniness paid off for once!).

A straw hat from Tractor Supply Company that Scott Eberle gave me from his time at said company (he currently works for the Austin Fire Department – maybe I’ll get a fireman’s hat from said department!).

This awesome hat I bought for $5 at Wal-Mart. With my aviator sunglasses on, I put this on and transform into Earl the trucker.

A Farmersville Farmers hat I got from Aaron Glenn.

The excellent cowboy hat pictured at the top that I got from Wal-Mart, and lasted through four summers of summer camp. It’s my swimming hat.

This sweet homemade hat featuring a manatee.

My sweet wife, who was my sweet girlfriend at the time, hand-stitched this on to the back:

What a woman.

And finally, the triumvirate of the better cowboy hats and the Australian walk-about hat.


In the office, they serve as decoration, and a visual symbol of all the metaphorical hats a minister must wear.

There are also hats I mourn. I had a Snoopy “WWI Flying Ace” hat that I still miss, and I donated my barbarian helmet my dad made from a mixing bowl and two scraps of wood to summer camp. And one hat that bit the dust last year will certainly get its own entry, as it involves Greek class and the book of Revelation.

I was thinking the other day about hats and remembered, as if from a dream, the cartoon linked to below. I think it must have affected me on a deep level as a very young child, because I still feel this thrill of adopting a whole new persona when I put on a special hat.

(Make sure and appreciate some of the things that were deemed appropriate for children in 1956 when this cartoon was made, such as Elmer’s threat to see Bugs’ spurting blood, the questionable portrayal of Native Americans, and smoking!)

Bugs' Bonnets

Bible Verses That Freak Me Out # 27 – You SURE you want to pray that? – Matthew 6:12

Lurking within the most well known prayer in scripture is a soul-wrenching challenge.

“Our Father, who art in heaven,” we say, and proceed smoothly along, asking for his kingdom to come, will be done, daily bread, and then, apparently we all have a moment of insanity, or we haven’t been listening closely.

“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

Wait, back up. Asking God for forgiveness – right, got it. Totally normal. But there’s a condition in there that we normally just skip over. In the Lord’s Prayer, we are asking God to forgive us in the same way and to the same degree that we have already forgiven the people around us. That's what the "as" is for. And behold! As we have already forgiven our debtors - past tense!

Are you sure you want to pray that? In case we missed it, Jesus helpfully adds after the prayer; “For if you forgive men their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.” Matt. 6:14-15

Great. Very clear – in a "makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck" kind of way. I like F.F. Bruce's comment in Hard Sayings of Jesus: "The meaning is unambiguous, and it is unwise to try to avoid its uncomfortable challenge."

So, how are you doing at forgiveness? Well enough to ask God to follow your lead in the way He forgives you?

This theme runs all through the New Testament. Our relationship to others is the true yardstick by which we can judge our relationship with God.

“If someone says , ‘I love God’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.” – 1 John 4:20

Tangent: When praying this in a communal setting, I can never anticipate whether we are going to say “debts,” “trespasses,” or “sins”, with the corresponding “debtors,” “those who have trespassed against us,” or “those who have sinned against us.” I always wait and let the first one go by before joining in for the last part. If you ever get to lead a Lord’s Prayer, you can freak everyone out by mixing and matching – start with a trespasses and switch to debtors for the closing! They’ll never see it coming!

Tangent off the tangent: In Greek, the word is literally “debt.” You know, the money kind. It can of course have the meaning of an offense, as verses 14 and 15 show, obviously expanding on "debts." In Aramaic (what Jesus was likely speaking) the word for “debt” and “sin” is the same. What a fun difference that makes in the prayer! “And forgive us what we owe you, as we have forgiven the people who owe us money.”
Ahem.

So – forgiveness. Hard to do. One reason I think we have trouble with the idea of forgiveness is that we have mistaken expectations of what forgiveness entails. We imagine it as a “once for all” deal. “I’ll forgive you, and then I’ll never think about it again.” Well, that doesn’t work even for minor offenses, much less major trauma. Similarly, we imagine that forgiveness is the same as saying, “No harm, no foul.” We think it is saying that we “pretend it never happened.” We think forgiveness is denial or willful ignorance of sin. We think it means there are no consequences.

God can forgive and forget. We his creations can approximate only the forgiveness part. Like grief, forgiveness is a process. Like grief, it may have to be dealt with on a regular basis as it continues to lessen in intensity over time. Especially when who and what we must forgive is something and someone who has caused us grief. And it does not mean that there are no consequences for sin or wrongdoing. So, what does it mean?

C.S. Lewis describes forgiveness in Mere Christianity in a way that is helpful to me, in a meditation on the parallel idea of “loving your enemies” (Matt. 5:43):

“We might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbor as yourself means. Well, how exactly do I love myself?

Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently “love your neighbor” does not mean “feel fond of him” or “find him attractive.” I ought to have seen that before, because of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact, it is the other way round; my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are…

In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of things my enemies do. Or, as Christian teachers long ago would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.

For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life – namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself…In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man.

Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.”

And that, my friends, is precisely the way God forgives us.

“Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ has also forgiven you.” Ephesians 4:32