Douglas Lee

“Some Christians base their identity on being a sinner. I think they have it wrong—or only half right. You are not simply a sinner; you are a deeply loved sinner. And there is all the difference in the world between the two.”
― David G. Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery

“why was it that Jesus was able to get the Jewish people around him to believe he was God? How could he have overcome the unthinkability of that? Why did he succeed as the only person who ever claimed deity and also founded a major—indeed, the largest—movement and religious faith? The first answer is that his life must have been exquisitely beautiful. The greatness we get a glimpse of in the Gospels must have smitten those around him. It is extraordinarily difficult to claim to be perfect and divine and then to get the people who actually live with you to believe it. But Jesus did”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“People who are forever breaking the rules, trying other roads, attempting to create their own system of values and truth from scratch, spend most of their time calling up someone to get them out of trouble and help repair the damage, and then ask the silly question “What went wrong?” As H. H. Farmer said, “If you go against the grain of the universe you get splinters.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Western secularists insist that their view of human rights is simply obvious to any rational person, but non-Western cultures respond that they are “far from self-evident.”9 This leaves human-rights activists quite vulnerable to charges of imperialism. If human rights and equality exist “just because we say so,” then activists are not able to persuade, only to coerce. They can force cultures to adopt Western, individualistic ideas of rights and equality by using money, political power, or even military force. But, the charge goes, all this is just the latest stage in the West’s inveterate bent to domination and colonialism. Western nations are now doing what they’ve always done, but disingenuously now, under the banner of “human rights.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World