Holiness is not for wimps and the cross is not negotiable, sweetheart, it's a requirement.
Interpretation
Holiness requires strength and commitment, not weakness or compromise.
This quote emphasizes that achieving holiness and faithfulness to the teachings of the cross requires a strong will and unwavering dedication. It conveys that one cannot approach spiritual growth with timidity or a willingness to negotiate principles; instead, one must embrace the challenges and sacrifices involved in living a truly devout life.
In practice
In a sermon about commitment to faith, this quote could remind the audience of the strength required in their spiritual journey.
I am not like a pebble on the beach - a grain of sand on the seashore or just one of millions of human beings past, present and future. No, I am a unique human being loved by God as if I were an only child - the only fruit of his creative powers.
I must not permit the evil capabilities of human nature to sour my faith in the tremendous good that is possible despite the frailty of that nature.
The sinner who suddenly realizes God's love for him and then looks at his rejection of that love feels a loss similar to the death of a loved one. A deep void is created in the soul and a loneliness akin to the agony of death.
Our memories are our own, and we cannot blame anything or anyone in the past for any pain dwelling there. If we open the door to them or keep hashing over past incidents in our minds, we have only ourselves to blame.
Man can and does rationalize his sins. He finds reasons for all his weakness, invents excuses that first calm and then deaden his conscience. He blames God, society, education, and environment for his wrong doing.
Love has been defined, analyzed, explained and excused. It has been the cause of wars, feuds, heroism, martyrdom, inordinate passion, and beautiful friendships. It pulls two people of opposite temperaments together into a married state and permits them to live happily. It makes friends understand each other without the necessity of words.
It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in Nature and in the world of though. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.
Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.
To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.
The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
Ye shall only have foes to be hated; but not foes to be despised: ye must be proud of your foes.
The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me
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