Quotes Tagged "holiness"

The Christian does not avoid sin to achieve salvation, but rather salvation brings him to a desire not to sin. The closer that one's spirit is synchronized with the holy knowledge of God, the more he comprehends how and why sin is destructive to himself and others in each and every circumstance. The dwindling desire for sin is a premature gift of Heaven - where there will be no sin, where all will, too, possess that full and complete wisdom; all will have perfect reasons not to sin. In this way, free will might still exist, but the shared wisdom of God will simply outwit all desires, impulses, and needs to sin.

Gnosticism, a highly intellectual second-century movement (the word ‘gnostic’ comes from the Greek word for ‘knowledge’) that was later declared heretical, didn’t help. Heretics were intellectual therefore intellectuals were, if not heretical, then certainly suspect. So ran the syllogism. Intellectual simplicity or, to put a less flattering name on it, ignorance was widely celebrated. The biography of St Antony records with approval that he ‘refused to learn to read and write or to join in the silly games of the other little children’. Education and silly games are here bracketed together, and both are put in opposition to holiness. Instead of this, we learn, Antony ‘burned with the desire for God’. That this wasn’t quite true – Antony’s letters reveal a much more careful thinker than this implies – didn’t much matter: it appealed to a powerful ideal. No need to read: give up both books and bread and you will win God’s favour. Even intellectuals were susceptible to this pretty picture: it was hearing about how the simple, unlettered Antony had inspired so many to turn to Christ that led Augustine to start striking himself on the head, tearing his hair and asking, ‘What is wrong with us?’ Ignorance was power.

To know God as he is, is to love him as he is and to want to be like him.

For lack of knowledge of the Holy One, we perish in sin of hell.

Call it love, call it kindness, call it spirituality, call it justice, it's all one.

Where there is love, there is justice - where there is no love, there is no justice. And love is the purest form of expectation-less kindness, hence kindness itself is justice. So, to be kind is, to be loving, and to be loving is, to be just. Call it love, call it kindness, call it spirituality, call it justice, it's all one.

No pilgrimage is holier than compassion, no gospel is truer than kindness, no offering is grander than love.

Being holistic doesn't mean mumbling mystical mumbo-jumbo all the time, it means seeing the reality as it is, without giving in to either supernatural nonsense or intellectual arrogance.

Changing the family given name to a Sanskrit based name, doesn't make a person either free or holy - by doing so, one only exchanges one prison for another.

Love is holiness.

It’s so hard to balance in our minds the knowledge that ‘the world’ is mundanely ‘a planet.’ The former is so holy; the latter merely a science project.

Virtue is akin to holiness, an attribute of godliness.

When Jesus comes to live in our hearts, the seed of holiness is planted.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.