Lewis B. Smedes

Author

1921-08-20

Quotes by Lewis B. Smedes

• The lies we tell ourselves are the most subtle of all lies.

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• The Holy Spirit, thank God, often enables people to forgive even though they are not sure how they did it.

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• The problem with revenge is that it never evens the score. It ties both the injured and the injurer to an escalator of pain. Both are stuck on the escalator as long as parity is demanded, and the escalator never stops.

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• Our society is pluralistic. We who accept the privilege of membership in that society agree to respect the people's right to live by their own religious precepts.

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• When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look the evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.

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• Forgiving is love's toughest work, and love's biggest risk.

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• What is a disloyal act? A person is disloyal if he treats you as a stranger when, in fact, he belongs to you as a friend or partner. Each of us is bound to some special others by the invisible fibers of loyalty.

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• It takes one person to forgive, it takes two people to be reunited.

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• We are anxious in the face of our unchangeable past; we long to recreate segments of our private histories, but we are stuck with them.

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• At the cross, God was punishing Jesus for the sins of the world. God's justice required a penalty from sinners, and in his unspeakable love, he paid the penalty himself in the person of his crucified Son.

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• Restorative justice is not a replacement of retributive justice, but a complement. It seeks the rehabilitation of the wrongdoer and the repair of the victim's injury.

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• Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.

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• When we have been badly injured and clearly wronged, we make an instant caricature of the person who did it to us. We define him totally by the one wrong he did.

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• To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.

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