Many Christians today are told that their biblical views are intolerant and unloving. This, however, is itself intolerance. Tolerance does not mean that individual values are rejected. The dictionary says that tolerance is “the ability to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with.” That word, by definition, means that both worldly and Christian views get to coexist.
Tolerance
A.W. Tozer
Sins such as pride, vanity, self-centeredness, levity, worldliness, gluttony, the telling of “white” lies, borderline dishonesty, lack of compassion for the unfortunate, complacency, absorption in the affairs of this life, love of pleasure, the holding of grudges, stinginess, gossiping… are so common that they have been accepted as normal by the average church and are either not mentioned at all or referred to in smiling half-humor by the clergy. While not as spectacular as a roaring weekend drunk or as dramatic as a violent explosion of temper, they are in the long run more deadly than either, for they are seldom recognized as sin and are practically never repented of. They remain year after year to grieve the Spirit and sap the life of the church, while everyone continues to speak the words of the true faith and go through the motions of perfunctory godliness, not knowing that there is anything wrong.
Francois Fenelon
We seek God afar off, in projects perhaps altogether unattainable, and we do not consider that we possess Him now in the midst of confusion, by the exercise of simple faith, provided we bear humbly and bravely the annoyances which come from others, and our own imperfections.
Charles Kraft
Respect for other cultural worlds is a Christian principle. But the absolutization of tolerance that often underlies rhetoric about “multiculturalism” is in no way Christian.
Katherine Walden
Yes, I love you, even if I cannot celebrate what you celebrate, I still love you. Disagreeing with you does not mean I hate you.
Yes, I respect you, even if I cannot endorse certain decisions you make and lifestyle choices you make.
Just because I cannot endorse your lifestyle choices, it does not mean I do not respect you as a person.
Yes, I will fight for you if anyone dares bully you or slander you or paint you with a broad paintbrush of hateful stereotypes born out of ignorance.
As my faith has become a victim of media bullying, slander and deliberate misrepresentation in the hope of silencing my voice, I will never stand by and watch you be bullied.
All I ask is that you do the same for me.
Horatius Bonar
Do not heed the jar of man’s warring opinions. Let God be true and every man a liar. The Bible is the Bible still. If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God.
John R. W. Stott
The incentive to peacemaking is love, but it degenerates into appeasement whenever justice is ignored. To forgive and to ask for forgiveness are both costly exercises. All authentic Christian peacemaking exhibits the love and justice – and so the pain – of the cross.
C. S. Lewis
We know that one school of psychology already regards religion as a neurosis. When this particular neurosis becomes inconvenient to the government, what is to hinder the government from proceeding to ‘cure’ It? Such ‘cure’ will, of course, be compulsory; but under the humanitarian theory it will not be called by the shocking name of Persecution. No one will blame us for being Christians, no one will hate us, no one revile us. The new Nero will approach us with the silky manners of a doctor, and though all will be in fact {compulsory}, all will go on within the unemotional therapeutic sphere where words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, or ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ are never heard. And thus when the command is given, every prominent Christian in the land may vanish overnight into Institutions for the Treatment of the Ideologically Unsound, and it will rest with the expert gaolers to when (if ever) they are to emerge. But it will not be persecution. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident, the intention was purely therapeutic.
Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.
The awareness of sin used to be our shadow, Christians hated sin, feared it, flew from it. But now the shadow has faded. Nowadays, the accusation you have sinned is often said with a grin.
Francis A. Schaeffer
We should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.