It is only when we truly love others, whether they are our brothers and sisters in Christ or our unsaved neighbors, that we can endure through conflict without walking away or giving in to the outrage. If the Christlike response to the age of outrage lies in our ability to disagree in love, a crucial first step is our commitment to forbear with others, whether with Christians who may not be as mature as we are, or with the lost who are captive to an incomplete and distorted worldview. This kind of love can forbear with others only because it remains transfixed upon the mission of building the Kingdom of God.
Motivation
John Bevere
We cannot properly serve unless we are content. Lacking this virtue will make us prone to view situations from the angle of how will this benefit me? Outward actions and words can appear unselfish or even self-denying, but if they are not founded in contentment, they will be fueled by self-serving motives.
Steve Corbett
Until we embrace our mutual brokenness, our work with low-income people is likely to do more harm than good. I sometimes unintentionally reduce poor people to objects that I use to fulfill my own need to accomplish something. I am not okay, and you are not okay. But Jesus can fix us both.
N T Wright
When we shift from personal purity to personal happiness, we lose biblical hope because we are not focusing on God’s agenda, we are focusing on our own. God’s agenda is guaranteed on our agenda is not.
John Bunyan
You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.
Katherine Walden
He came with no agenda beyond love. As we celebrate His birth, may we demonstrate that same love -with no agenda.
John Arnott
If you seek Him because you love Him, and not for your own agenda’s sake to be successful or noticed, you will not go wrong.
Thomas Merton
The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them
Byron Spradlin
Worship is the intentional attitudes and actions of focusing on God. It is the life-discipline we ought repeatedly to exercise and develop. It grows out of the foundational motive of deep and wonder-based gratitude to God for His salvaging and sustaining us.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
False doctrine does not necessarily make a man a heretic, but an evil heart can make any doctrine heretical.