Top 78 Lewis B. Smedes Quotes
#1. Common sense suggests that if no one ever judged other people, there would be no real human community.
Lewis B. Smedes
#2. Forgiving is, first of all, a way of helping yourself to get free of the unfair pain somebody caused you.
Lewis B. Smedes
#3. There are some things about God that, were I to stop believing them, my world would change color, my hope would turn sour, and the meaning of my life would be yanked inside out.
Lewis B. Smedes
#4. Retributive justice did not arise from any Christian principle; almost every pre-Christian society dealt with wrongdoers by causing them pain.
Lewis B. Smedes
#5. 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.
Lewis B. Smedes
#6. Some people have loved ones they will not forsake, even though they are a pain in the neck.
Lewis B. Smedes
#8. Kindness is the power that moves us to support and heal someone who offers nothing in return.
Lewis B. Smedes
#9. Hope is to our spirits what oxygen is to our lungs. Lose hope and you die. They may not bury you for awhile, but without hope you are dead inside. The only way to face the future is to fly straight into it on the wings of hope ... hope is the energy of the soul. Hope is the power of tomorrow.
Lewis B. Smedes
#10. 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.
Lewis B. Smedes
#11. My wife has lived with at least five different men since we were wed - and each of the five has been me.
Lewis B. Smedes
#12. Seeing reality for what it is is what we call discernment. The work of discernment is very hard.
Lewis B. Smedes
#13. Because arrogance is born in personal vanity, arrogant people are driven without mercy. They can never get enough power to fill the soul's needs or enough respect to overcome the fear that they deserve less than they are getting.
Lewis B. Smedes
#14. The right to personal privacy is precious. Without it, we are all potential victims for a prying secret police.
Lewis B. Smedes
#15. The God who has the whole world in his hands has grace for the whole world in his heart.
Lewis B. Smedes
#16. Forgiving is love's toughest work, and love's biggest risk.
Lewis B. Smedes
#17. If you cannot free people from their wrongs and see them as the needy people they are, you enslave yourself to your own painful past and by fastening yourself to the past, you let your hate become your future.
Lewis B. Smedes
#18. Our history is an inevitable component of our being. One thing only can release us from the grip of our history. That one thing is forgiveness.
Lewis B. Smedes
#20. Any lazy or biased fool can have opinions; making judgments is the hard work of responsible and compassionate people.
Lewis B. Smedes
#21. Nothing enables us to forgive like knowing in our hearts that we have been forgiven.
Lewis B. Smedes
#22. 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.
Lewis B. Smedes
#23. 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.
Lewis B. Smedes
#24. Promise keeping is a powerful means of grace in a time when people hardly depend on each other to remember and live by their word.
Lewis B. Smedes
#25. Some people still have causes they will not desert, even though the cause seems lost.
Lewis B. Smedes
#27. Modern Americans suffer from a fear of judging. Passing judgment on the behavior of fellow human beings is considered an act of medieval, undemocratic intolerance.
Lewis B. Smedes
#28. It takes one person to forgive, it takes two people to be reunited.
Lewis B. Smedes
#29. The first and often only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness ... When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.
Lewis B. Smedes
#30. You and I were created for joy, and if we miss it we miss the reason for our existence. If our joy is honest joy, it must somehow be congruous with human tragedy. This is the test of joy's integrity. It is compatible with pain. Only the heart that hurts has a right to joy.
Lewis B. Smedes
#32. Gratitude is the best feeling I would ever have, the ultimate joy of living.
Lewis B. Smedes
#33. I am certain that people never forgive because they believe they have an obligation to do it or because someone told them to do it. Forgiveness has to come from inside as a desire of the heart. Wanting to is the steam that pushes the forgiving engine.
Lewis B. Smedes
#34. 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.
Lewis B. Smedes
#35. I believe that we should, on biblical grounds, tell all parents of mentally disabled children that God loves their children, regrets terribly that they are disabled, and will, when they die, carry them gently into a heavenly life where every person is forever whole.
Lewis B. Smedes
#36. The secret of grace is that it can be all right at the center even when it is all wrong on the edges.
Lewis B. Smedes
#37. A wise judge may let mercy temper justice but may not let mercy undo it.
Lewis B. Smedes
#38. 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.
Lewis B. Smedes
#39. The Holy Spirit, thank God, often enables people to forgive even though they are not sure how they did it.
Lewis B. Smedes
#40. When you release the wrongdoer from the wrong, you cut a malignant tumor out of your inner life. You set a prisoner free, but you discover that the real prisoner was yourself.
Lewis B. Smedes
#41. No doubt, corporate CEOs who lie to their shareholders and politicians who lie to their public know and believe intellectually that lying is immoral. Why then do they lie? They lie to others because they first lie to themselves.
Lewis B. Smedes
#42. The only way to heal the pain which will not heal itself is to forgive the person who hurt you. Forgiveness heals the memory's vision ... You set a prisoner free, but you discover the real prisoner was yourself.
Lewis B. Smedes
#43. Nothing is more private than a woman's body; it is her physical, emotional, and moral citadel. She cannot be free at all if she is not free to decide for herself, in private, what to do with her body.
Lewis B. Smedes
#44. Some people still make promises and keep those they make. When they do, they help make life around them more stably human.
Lewis B. Smedes
#45. Forgiveness is the key that can unshackle us from a past that will not rest in the grave of things over and done with. As long as our minds are captive to the memory of having been wronged, they are not free to wish for reconciliation with the one who wronged us.
Lewis B. Smedes
#46. God does not give us salvation because we believe. Our believing is only the normal way of receiving the salvation he freely gives.
Lewis B. Smedes
#47. The blood of Christ covers all of our sins, but each of us must do personal business with God in order to experience his forgiveness.
Lewis B. Smedes
#48. God is not a doormat, nor should anyone else be a doormat.
Lewis B. Smedes
#49. Don't do it quickly, but don't wait too long ... If we wait too long to forgive, our rage settles in and claims squatter's rights to our souls.
Lewis B. Smedes
#50. True, the apostles did not expressly say that people will be saved only if they repent, believe, and confess. But most evangelicals assume - with good reason - that this is what the apostles implied.
Lewis B. Smedes
#51. 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.
Lewis B. Smedes
#52. Jesus said that we should render to the state what properly belongs to the state, and though he had taxes in mind, we might reasonably infer that giving the state the job of punishing wrongdoers is one way of giving the state its due.
Lewis B. Smedes
#53. The rule is: we cannot really forgive ourselves unless we look at the failure in our past and call it by its right name.
Lewis B. Smedes
#54. My father was only thirty-one when he died of a heart attack, much too young for a father to die and leave his young wife with five rambunctious little kids to take care of. I was the youngest. Only a couple of months old when he died.
Lewis B. Smedes
#55. We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are.
Lewis B. Smedes
#56. 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.
Lewis B. Smedes
#57. Any moment that opens us up to the reality that life is good is a parable of the supreme end for which we were made.
Lewis B. Smedes
#58. As I read the New Testament, I find only one path to salvation - the path of an informed faith in Jesus Christ.
Lewis B. Smedes
#59. Nobody sees reality whole; we all need others to show us the parts of it that they see better than we do. Nobody sees reality with total accuracy; we all need others to correct our own vision.
Lewis B. Smedes
#60. Sometimes I like to list the strongest arguments I can find to support a point of view I think is wrong. When I have them before me, I am up against a real opponent rather than a hypothetical one that is an easy target for me to hit.
Lewis B. Smedes
#61. When I feel the joy of receiving a gift my heart nudges me to join creation's ballet, the airy dance of giving and receiving, and getting and giving again.
Lewis B. Smedes
#62. In a sinful world, no community can exist for long where nobody is ever held accountable: no teacher would grade a student's performance; no citizen would sit on a jury or call a failed leader to account.
Lewis B. Smedes
#63. Forgiving is not having to understand. Understanding may come later, in fragments, an insight here and a glimpse there, after forgiving.
Lewis B. Smedes
#64. The lies we tell ourselves are the most subtle of all lies.
Lewis B. Smedes
#65. waiting is our destiny. as creatures who cannot by themselves bring about what they hope for; we wait in the darkness for a flame we cannot light. we wait in fear for a happy ending that we cannot write. we wait for a 'not yet' that feels like a 'not ever.
Lewis B. Smedes
#66. Vengeance is having a videotape planted in your soul that cannot be turned off. It plays the painful scene over and over again inside your mind ... And each time it plays you feel the clap of pain again ... Forgiving turns off the videotape of pained memory Forgiving sets you free.
Lewis B. Smedes
#67. Their pain [the injurer's pain at having injured you] and your pain create the point and counterpoint for the rhythm of reconciliation. When the beat of their pain is a response to the beat of yours, they have become truthful in their feelings ... they have moved a step closer to a truthful reunion.
Lewis B. Smedes
#68. Gandhi was right: if we all live by 'an eye for an eye' the whole world will be blind. The only way out is forgiveness.
Lewis B. Smedes
#69. Our sense of fairness tells us that people should pay for the wrong they do.
Lewis B. Smedes
#70. To miss out on joy is to miss out on the reason for your existence.
Lewis B. Smedes
#71. I have discovered that most people who tell me that they cannot forgive a person who wronged them are handicapped by a mistaken understanding of what forgiving is.
Lewis B. Smedes
#72. 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.
Lewis B. Smedes
#73. You can forgive someone almost anything. But you cannot tolerate everything ... We don't have to tolerate what people do just because we forgive them for doing it. Forgiving heals us personally. To tolerate everything only hurts us all in the long run.
Lewis B. Smedes
#74. When forgiveness is necessary, don't wait too long. We must begin to forgive, because without forgiving, we choke off our own joy; we kill our own soul. People carrying hate and resentment can invest themselves so deeply in that resentment that they gradually define themselves in terms of it.
Lewis B. Smedes
#75. Self control is about being in charge of the direction our lives are taking. Now for the paradox: We get control of our lives, ultimately, not by will power but by surrender.
Lewis B. Smedes
#76. You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.
Lewis B. Smedes
#77. Forgiveness is God's invention for coming to terms with a world in which people are unfair to each other and hurt each other deeply. He began by forgiving us. And He invites us all to forgive each other.
Lewis B. Smedes
#78. Happy people are not their own enemies, do not carry on an endless war with their souls. We may be fiercely at odds with the wrongs of the world around us. But inside ourselves, near the core, if we are happy, we are at peace.
Lewis B. Smedes
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