Quotes About Judgment

He probably thought it was a woman. Whenever a young man gets depressed, everybody thinks it's a woman.

Your deepest, darkest sins and your shameful secrets are simply irrelevant when it comes to the counterintuitive, ecstatic announcement of the gospel. So are your goodness, your rightness, your church attendance, and all of the wise, moral, mature decisions you have made and actions you have taken.

In the religious version, you'll often hear that when this happens, one group heads to a good place, and the rest of humanity heads to a bad place. (The people who tell this version of the story are always in the good group, coincidentally enough.) And so your job is to get as many people inside the tent/club/religion/group as possible so that when that day comes, you can all escape together and go somewhere else.

This story... blasts to pieces our biases and labels with a declaration that God is on everyone's side, extending grace and compassion to everyone, especially those we have most strongly decided are not on God's side.

There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.

There are those, like the church websites quoted at the beginning of this chapter, who put it quite clearly: "We get one life to choose heaven or hell, and once we die, that's it. One or the other, forever." God in the end doesn't get what God wants, it's declared, because some will turn, repent, and believe, and others won't.

as the king rose from his seat, Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king's belly. Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it. (That's in the Bible. Word for word.)

Third, it is our responsibility to be extremely careful about making negative, decisive

You start with your 1 and then you suspend judgment on what you're doing, because you don't know what you have when you start. When you are constantly judging what you're doing, you aren't here. You aren't present. You are standing outside of your life, looking in, observing. The time for judgement will come at some point, but in the moment, you have only the 1. And then the 2. And then the 3...

They aren't interesting. What you haven't done, where you didn't go to school, what you haven't accomplished, who you don't know and what you are scared of simply aren't interesting.

Our eschatology shapes our ethics. Eschatology is about last things. Ethics are about how you live. What you believe about the future shapes, informs, and determines how you live now.

Failure, we see again and again, isn't final, judgment has a point, and consequences are for correction.

And whenever people claim that one group is in, saved, accepted by God, forgiven, enlightened, redeemed- and everybody else isn't- why is it that those who make this claim are almost always part of the group that's in?

While I threw myself into any social situation, could put on any mask—punk, preppy, artist—I also put masks on everyone I met, instantly judging them. I inhabited my masks, adopted the personas. Perhaps it was self-preservation, and stemmed from my itinerant childhood, which had forced me to form friendships quickly, potential allies or foes judged in an instant.

But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

If a grasshopper tries to fight a lawnmower, one may admire his courage but not his judgement.

Does history record any case in which the majority was right?

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.

A boy who gets a C- in 'Appreciation of Television' can't be all bad.

Come Judgment Day, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along.

The verdict to be passed on the third planet around Sol was never in doubt.

If I choose to dine with publicans and sinners, that is my business. But I do not choose to break bread with Pharisees.

It is not nonsense and nobody asked you; you aren't competent to have an opinion about it.

There's precious little choice." "There's always a choice! This one is a choice between 'bad' and 'worse—'which is a difference much more poignant than that between 'good' and 'better.