2
" Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (see Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me that she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last 'trick', whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school.
'But how?' we ask.
Then the voice says, 'They have washed their robes and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.'
There they are. There *we* are - the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life's tribulations, but through it all clung to faith.
My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace. "
― Brennan Manning , The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out
8
" We -- the industrialized, technologized world -- have never been richer. And yet to an extraordinary extent we in the West continue to inhabit a moral and cultural universe shaped by the hedonistic imperatives and radical ideals of the Sixties. Culturally, morally the world we inhabit is increasingly a trash world: addicted to sensation, besieged everywhere by the cacophonous, mind-numbing din of rock music, saturated with pornography, in thrall to the lowest common denominator wherever questions of taste, manners or intellectual delicacy are concerned. Marwick was right: 'The cultural revolution, in short, had continuous, uninterrupted, and lasting consequences'. "
― Roger Kimball , The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
15
" What do we do if we come across trouble, sir?' Cahill asked, slapping at a fly. 'As much as I enjoy giving the rebel turds a walloping, it should be down to the Militia to keep the buggers in check.'
'They are doing their job,' Mullone said, glancing at a free-standing Celtic Cross that had once been a prominent feature beside the road, but was now strangled with weeds, besieged with dark moss and deeply pitted with age.
'If you call plundering, fighting and torture work, sir.'
'You don't have much faith in the peace talks then, Seán?'
'No, sir. There's more chance of me taking holy orders and becoming the Pope than there is of peace,' Cahill replied. 'The negotiations that spout from the politicians mouths are nothing but wet farts.'
-from Liberty or Death "
― David Cook , Liberty or Death (The Soldier Chronicles #1)
16
" What do we do if we come across trouble, sir?' Cahill asked, slapping at a fly. 'As much as I enjoy giving the rebel turds a walloping, it should be down to the Militia to keep the buggers in check.'
'They are doing their job,' Mullone said, glancing at a free-standing Celtic Cross that had once been a prominent feature beside the road, but was now strangled with weeds, besieged with dark moss and deeply pitted with age.
'If you call plundering, fighting and torture work, sir.'
'You don't have much faith in the peace talks then, Seán?'
'No, sir. There's more chance of me taking holy orders and becoming the Pope than there is of peace,' Cahill replied. 'The negotiations that spout from the politicians mouths are nothing but wet farts. "
― David Cook , Liberty or Death (The Soldier Chronicles #1)