Those who worship God must do so in the way He requires, treating Him as holy.
“In the modern culture, much emphasis has been placed on the "culture of the fiesh" and the eternal and spiritual nature of man has been mininized. Self-indulgence has become the primary value and is protected by our modern society under the pretext of individual "civil rights." Personal gratification and fulfilment in this world has supplanted the spiritual striving for purity and holiness, which is the true source of joy. The love of God has been replaced by love of self. The desire for eternal bliss has been replaced by the desire for worldly bliss. The fear of eternal punishment has been replaced by the fear of worldly discomfort and condemnation. Man has supplanted God as the measure of all things.”
― Unchanging Witness: The Consistent Christian Teaching on Homosexuality in Scripture and Tradition
― Unchanging Witness: The Consistent Christian Teaching on Homosexuality in Scripture and Tradition
“..we're not asking the right questions. What if your relationship isn't as much about you and your spouse as it is about you and God? "We have to stop asking of marriage what God never designed it to give — perfect happiness, conflict-free living, and idolatrous obsession... Finding a 'soulmate' — someone who will complete us: the problem with looking to another human to complete us is that, spiritually speaking, it's idolatry. We are to find our fulfillment and purpose in God and if we expect our spouse to be 'God' to us, he or she will fail every day. No person can live up to such expectations. Everyone has bad days, yells at his or her spouse, or is downright selfish. Despite these imperfections, God created the husband and wife to steer each other in His direction. If happiness is our primary goal, we'll get a divorce as soon as happiness seems to wane. If receiving love is our primary goal, we'll dump our spouse as soon as they seem to be less attentive. But if we marry for the glory of God, to model His love and commitment to our children, and to
reveal His witness to the world, divorce makes no sense.”
― Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy? Library Edition
reveal His witness to the world, divorce makes no sense.”
― Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy? Library Edition
“As already noted, what happens with the criterion of "love" in a culture that highly values "freedom" is that "love" is defined in terms of "freedom." The "loving thing to do" becomes letting people do what they want to do, as long as the rights of others are not infringed. Like cake batter, love takes the shape of the mold into which it is poured. In the West, this mold consists of liberation and equality. No society will stand with so meager a basis for thinking through its great moral challenges. Citizens of Western culture lack a robust enough moral vocabulary and ethic to explain why they object to things their consciences feel are wrong. In the public square, they are restricted to the language of freedom and equality in all moral matters. Such a "vapid" ethic fails to provide sensible answers for a number of great moral questions: abortion, euthanasia, gun laws, freedom of speech, sexual ethics, and so forth.”
― Unchanging Witness: The Consistent Christian Teaching on Homosexuality in Scripture and Tradition
― Unchanging Witness: The Consistent Christian Teaching on Homosexuality in Scripture and Tradition
“Without the infinite-personal God, all a person can do, as Nietzsche points out, is to make “systems.” In today’s speech we would call them “game plans.” A person can erect some type of structure, some type of limited frame, in which he lives, shutting himself in that frame and not looking beyond it. This game plan can be one of a number of things. It can sound high and noble, such as talking in an idealistic way about the greatest good for the greatest number. Or it can be a scientist’s concentrating on some small point of science so that he does not have to think of any of the big questions, such as why things exist at all. It can be a skier concentrating for years on knocking one-tenth of a second from a downhill race. Or it can as easily be a theological word game within the structure of the existential methodology. That is where modern people, building only on themselves, have come, and that is where they are now.”
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“The most dangerous state in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the power of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them.”
― A Conflict of Visions
― A Conflict of Visions
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