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“Nine Ascending steps of loving one’s enemy: 1.) take no evil initiative; 2.) do not avenge another’s evil; 3.) Be quiet; 4.) suffer wrongfully; 5.) surrender to the evil doer more than he demands; 6.) do not hate the evil doer; 7.) Love him; 8.) Do him good; 9.) Entreat God on his behalf.”
—John Chrysostom, 5th Century Church Father
“The LORD is exalted, for he dwells on high; he will fill Zion with justice and righteousness, and he will be the stability of your times, abundance of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge; the fear of the LORD is Zion’s treasure.”
—Isaiah 33:5-6
“The pac Romana (the Roman peace) was won and maintained by a brutal sword; not a few Jews thought the messianic peace would have to be secured by a still mightier sword. Instead, it was secured by an innocent man who suffered and died at the hands of the Romans, of the Jews, and of all of us. And by his death he effected for his own followers peace with God, and therefore ‘the peace of God which transcends all understanding’ (Phil.4:7).”
— D.A. Carson, The Gospel According to John
“Come, our conscience to relieve from each sin remembered. Come, our savior’s blood to plead; naked we surrender. Sin hath left a wound revealing; Spirit, help us with your healing.”
—Come, O Spirit, by Isaac Wardell
“Very early in the morning on the first day of the week, before anyone had done a stroke of work or acquired a jot of merit, he rose from the sepulchre, bringing new life to his disciples. What then began had nothing to do with last week's work or last week's sins; they all seemed centuries away. The old world for Christ's disciples had ended in calamity, had gone down into a gulf of darkness; the earth had crumbled under their feet, they had nothing to stand upon. But here was something as new as the creation of the world where no world was; new life straight from the hands of the only living God.”
—Austin Farrer
“From beginning to end, the Holy Scriptures testify that the predicament of fallen humanity is so serious, so grave, so irremediable from within, that nothing short of divine intervention can rectify it.”
― Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ
“[L]ove is a vital principle uniting, or seeking to unite two together, the lover, to wit, and the beloved."
— Augustine
“When uprightness is joined to superabundant prosperity, the motivation for the uprightness is murky. At best, the source of the uprightness is uncertain; and, because it is untested, to that extent the commitment to righteousness is comparatively shallow. There is, therefore, something less than optimal about virtues developed and preserved in great affluence. So, until prosperity and goodness are pulled apart, it may not be a determinate matter whether Job loves the good for its own sake, or whether what he loves is mingled good and wealth.”
—Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness
“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy