We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. We must not assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God.
Nothing can be more cruel than the leniency which abandons others to their sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the severe reprimand which calls another Christian in one’s community back from the path of sin.
A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes – and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.
A pastor should never complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men.
But the Christian also knows that he not only cannot and dare not be anxious, but that there is no need for him to be so. Neither anxiety now work can secure his daily bread, for bread is the gift of the Father.
How would you expect to find community while you intentionally withdraw from it at some point? The disobedient cannot believe; only the obedient believe.
The limitation of the ethical phenomenon to its place and time does not imply its rejection but, on the contrary, its validation. One does not use canons to shoot sparrows.
We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace.
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