Nick

“It is possible to merely assent that something is a sin without getting the new perspective on it and experiencing the new inward aversion to it that gives you the power and freedom to change. Put another way, there is a false kind of repentance that is really self-pity. You may admit your sin, but you aren’t really sorry for the sin itself. You are sorry about the painful consequences to you. You want that pain to stop, so you end the behavior. It may be, however, that there hasn’t been any real inward alteration of the false beliefs and hopes, the inordinate desires, and the mistaken self-perceptions that caused the sin. For example, this husband did not come to grips with his misplaced pride and insecurity, and his need for exaggerated deference and respect from women. His “repentance” was completely selfish, caring only about his pain and not about the grief he was causing his wife and God. He was only sorry about himself, not about the sin.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“In other words, we have no basis at all to think that Paul was plagued by guilt feelings or self-doubt while a Jew and that this was what drove him to consider Christ and finally convert. This all-too-prevalent, all-too-modern psychological approach to Paul fails to reckon with the clear statements Paul makes in Philippians 3, where he states that his conversion involved a revelation and a miracle. There is no evidence of tortured spiritual turmoil that led to this conversion. As Fred Craddock sees it, “We do not have in this text a portrait of a man at war with himself, crucified between the sky of God’s expectation and the earth of his own paltry performance. Paul is not in this scene a poor soul standing with a grade of ninety-nine before a God who counts one hundred as the lowest passing grade.”294 We ought not to read Paul as an early example of the introspective conscience of the West.295”
― Ben Witherington III, What Have They Done with Jesus? Beyond Strange Theories & Bad History-Why We Can Trust the Bible

“That means there has never been a parent on earth who wants joy for his or her children as much as your Father in heaven wants joy for you, his child. There has never been a human father who wanted to answer his child’s petitions as much as God wants to answer yours. Yet we know that God is not only loving but holy and just. How can he shower blessings down on sinful people who deserve the opposite? The answer is that Jesus got the scorpion and the snake so that we could have food at the Father’s table. He received the sting and venom of death in our place (cf. 1 Cor 15:55; Heb 2:14–15; Gen 3:15).”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke