Get Your Heart Broken

God comes in all his grand and searing holiness to hopeless and pain-ached sinners. He becomes like us - all the brokenness - not because he sins but because he so vulnerably and generously loves sinners. He comes to the proud with truth and the rebels with grace and the disturbed with peace.

His loving sinners will require him to forgive sinners for how they reject him and disbelieve him and misunderstand him and betray him. But a holy priest / prophet / king like Jesus loves his unholy neighbor, he let's the unholy hold him and feed him and follow him. Somehow, someway, his holiness transforms the unholy.

His love changes us in the midst of a mad and angry world. But he moved into this vale of tears to restore all things. It will be a lot of cross and tomb before there is resurrection.

Christians ought not think of themselves as saved, rather as those who are working out their salvation by loving the unholy and forgiving those who sin against them.

Christians associate with other Christians in such a way as to promote false holiness and insular love. Jesus wants Christians to get their hearts broken because they love the unholy so deeply. Jesus wants Christians to forgive a lot because of the sinful people they love.

Jesus wants Christians to become good news - those who love the poor and the prisoner, the maimed and diseased, the oppressed and distressed - not just those on the other side of the world though - but the ones that are your neighbors.

do.not.hate

Hatred paralyses life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it. 

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.  

-Anne Lamott

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.  -Jonathan Swift

In time we hate that which we often fear.  

-William Shakespeare

Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.

~George Bernard Shaw

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. 
This is how the whole scheme of things works. 
All good things are difficult to achieve;
 and bad things are very easy to get.  
~Rene Descartes

Hate is too great a burden to bear. 
It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.          
~Coretta Scott King

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. 
What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.  -Herman Hesse

Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat. 

-Henry Emerson Fosdick

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.  
-James Baldwin

When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.  -Chuck Palahniuk

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; 
only light can do that. 
Hate cannot drive out hate; 
only love can do that.  
~Martin Luther King, Jr.