It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.
Interpretation
True zeal requires self-reflection and confrontation of one's own faults rather than solely judging others.
In this quote, D. A. Carson criticizes a superficial form of zeal that focuses only on condemning the flaws and sins of others. He emphasizes the importance of introspection, suggesting that genuine zeal should involve recognizing and battling one's own temptations and shortcomings, rather than merely pointing out those of others. This idea underlines a deeper ethical responsibility to cultivate self-awareness and personal integrity.
In practice
During a church sermon discussing moral accountability.
Both God's love and God's wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax - in the cross.
Many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.
There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.
The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.
Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.
Imagination is a God-given gift; but if it is fed dirt by the eye, it will be dirty. All sin, not least sexual sin, begins with the imagination. Therefore what feeds the imagination is of maximum importance in the pursuit of kingdom righteousness.
EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.
Punishment is justice for the unjust.
It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldnβt see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.
What the United States has done is to be open to people who are fleeing tyranny, who are fleeing danger, but we have done it in a very careful way that has worked for us.
People used to say, "Ignorance is no excuse." Today, ignorance is no problem. After all, you have "a right to your own opinion" - and self-esteem to boot.
This is the reason we cannot complain of life: it keeps no one against his will.
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