= from Bonhoeffer =

here are few words i found inspiring from "the cost of discipleship" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. i would highly recommend this book. it is a hard read (challenging) but well worth it for really testing the heart.

this is from the chapter on the disciple and his neighbors.

Thus i am not permitted to apply to the other person what does not apply to me. For, with my judgment according to good and evil, I only affirm the other person’s evil, for he does exactly the same. But he does not know of the hidden iniquity of the good but seeks his justification in it. If i condemn his evil actions i thereby confirm him in his apparently good actions which are yet never the good commended by Christ. Thus we remove him from the judgment of Christ and subject him to human judgment. But i bring God’s judgment upon my head, for i then do not live any more on and out of the grace of Jesus Christ, but out of my knowledge of good and evil which i hold on to. To everyone God is the kind of God he believes in.

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But the disciples must ask, they must seek and knock, and then God will hear them. They have to learn that their anxiety and concern for others must drive them to intercession.