"It is easier to be enthusiastic about humanity with a capital "H" than it is to love individual men and women, especially those who are uninteresting, … exasperating, depraved, or otherwise unattractive. Loving everybody in general may be an excuse for loving nobody in particular."

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. Wrap it around carefully with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable .... The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is .... Hell."

There’s a story told of a husband and wife both of who were doctors - one a doctor of theology and the other a doctor of medicine. When their doorbell was rung and the maid answered, the inquirer would often ask for "the doctor". The maid’s interesting reply was: "Do you want the one who preaches or the one who practices?" We know the theory of Christian living but what we must do is to practice it!

Let me make sure that we clear up a few misunderstandings about forgiveness. Before we can build, we have to blast. We have to blast away the erroneous thoughts on what forgiveness is not.

• When you forgive a person, this does not mean you are immediately healed.
• When you forgive a person, this does not mean you are going to be buddy/buddy.
• When we forgive a person, this does not mean we surrender the right to restitution or justice when appropriate.
• When we forgive a person, this does not mean that we trust them, yet.
• When we forgive a person, we are not avoiding pain, we are opening the door to healing.
• When we forgive, we take the journey at the pace we are able to handle...the deeper the hurt, the longer the journey.

"None of us can do anything great on our own, but we can all do a small thing with great love."

"I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about Him being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

We’ve probably all heard the expression, “This separates the men from the boys!” What kinds of things separate the men from the boys? Things that involve danger and risk. Things that take courage and a willingness to sacrifice. Things that are grueling and gut-wrenching. Things that require maturity and perseverance, not just boyish enthusiasm and energy. In a sense, that’s what this parable (the Good Samaritan) teaches about the Christian life. Jesus isn’t separating the men from the boys, He’s separating the real Christian from the merely religious.

Our opinion of people depends less upon what we see in them than upon what they make us see in ourselves.

An elderly Christian lady, who was crippled with arthritis, used to hobble to the services of the church on crutches. It was a great ordeal and required of her a considerable amount of toil and pain. A friend of hers observed her regular and faithful attendance and asked, "How do you manage to be at every service?" Her answer was, "My heart gets there first, and my old legs just follow after."

A true friend is like toothpaste, when it is put under pressure, "it appears!"

"Our values determine our evaluations. If we value comfort more than character, then trials will upset us. If we value the material and physical more than the spiritual, we will not be able to count it all joy! If we live only for the present and forget about the future, the trials will make us bitter, not better."

Courage is fear that has said its prayers

Someone asked C.S. Lewis, "Why do the righteous suffer?" "Why not?"he replied. "They’re the only ones who can take it."

Inspiration in presentation comes only after perspiration in preparation!!!

Martin Niemoeller, a German pastor imprisoned for opposing the Nazis, illustrated the gravity of remaining silent: "In Germany, they first came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."