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Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just
Timothy J. Keller
Top 10 Best Quotes
“If believers in God don't honor the cries and claims of the poor, we don't honor him, whatever we profess, because we hide his beauty from the eyes of the world. When we pour ourselves out for the poor—that gets the world's notice.”
“God loves and defends those with the least economic and social power, and so should we. That is what it means to “do justice.”
“when the Spirit enables us to understand what Christ has done for us, the result is a life poured out in deeds of justice and compassion for the poor.5”
“the quartet of the vulnerable.”
“When these two words, tzadeqah and mishpat, are tied together, as they are over three dozen times, the English expression that best conveys the meaning is “social justice.”
“Think of the millions of children and teenagers in this country who have grown up in poverty. They attend failing schools and live in an environment unconducive to reading and learning. By the time they are in their teens many of them are functionally illiterate. This locks them into poverty or worse. It is estimated that a majority of convicts in prison are illiterate. Who is to blame?”
“There is something so valuable about human beings that not only may they not be murdered, but they can’t even be cursed without failing to give them their due, based on the worth bestowed upon them by God. The image of God carries with it the right to not be mistreated or harmed.”
“The Bible’s theological attack on racism is powerful, and in response many idealistic Christians have set out to form communities that are “multicultural,” but this is far, far easier said than done. There is no such thing as a neutral, culture-free way to do anything. If you form a governing board made up of people from different races, how will your board go about making decisions? Anglo, African-American, Hispanic, and Asian cultures all have distinct approaches to things like fact-finding, authority, persuasion, time frames, ratification of agreements, and so on. So which culture’s way of decision-making will prevail? And why should it be that culture’s method? And if you think you can craft a culture-free way to make decisions as a group, you are very naïve.”
“In a sermon entitled “The American Dream,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said: You see, the founding fathers were really influenced by the Bible. The whole concept of the imago dei, as it is expressed in Latin, the “image of God,” is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected. Not that they have substantial unity with God, but that every man has a capacity to have fellowship with God. And this gives him a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this as a nation: There are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because every man is made in the image of God. One day we will learn that. We will know one day that God made us to live together as brothers and to respect the dignity and worth of every man. This is why we must fight segregation with all of our nonviolent might.80”
“C. S. Lewis expressed it this way: The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. . . . This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. . . .81”
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Book Keywords:
glory, god, poverty, grace, justice