#heap

Jesus never concealed the fact that his religion included a demand as well as an offer. Indeed, the demand was as total as the offer was free. If he offered men his salvation, he also demanded their submission. He gave no encouragement whatever to thoughtless applicants for discipleship. He brought no pressure to bear on any inquirer. He sent irresponsible enthusiasts away empty. Luke tells of three men who either volunteered, or were invited, to follow Jesus; but no one passed the Lord’s test. The rich young ruler, too, moral, earnest and attractive, who wanted eternal life on his own terms, went away sorrowful, with his riches intact but with neither life nor Christ as his possession…The Christian landscape is strewn with the wreckage of derelict, half built towers—the ruins of those who began to build and were unable to finish. For thousands of people still ignore Christ’s warning and undertake to follow him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so. The result is the great scandal of Christendom today, so called “nominal Christianity.” In countries to which Christian civilization has spread, large numbers of people have covered themselves with a decent, but thin, veneer of Christianity. They have allowed themselves to become somewhat involved, enough to be respectable but not enough to be uncomfortable. Their religion is a great, soft cushion. It protects them from the hard unpleasantness of life, while changing its place and shape to suit their convenience. No wonder the cynics speak of hypocrites in the church and dismiss religion as escapism…The message of Jesus was very different. He never lowered his standards or modified his conditions to make his call more readily acceptable. He asked his first disciples, and he has asked every disciple since, to give him their thoughtful and total commitment. Nothing less than this will do ↗

— John R.W. Stott

#christ #cost-of-discipleship #cross #grace #change

There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them. ↗

— Greta Garbo

#cheapen #heart #inside #joys #many

Your arrogance doesn't cheapen me. ↗

— Toba Beta

#cheapen #pride #secret #arrogance

Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems. ↗

— Desmond Tutu

#africa #cheap #doing #favor #get

I always had the dream of flying, and the cheapest way is to become a skydiver. ↗

— Felix Baumgartner

#become #cheapest #dream #flying #had

I had the good fortune to be able to right an injustice that I thought was being heaped on young people by lowering the voting age, where you had young people that were old enough to die in Vietnam but not old enough to vote for their members of Congress that sent them there. ↗

— Birch Bayh

#age #being #congress #die #enough

Stop trying to treat music like it's a tennis shoe, something to be branded. If the music industry wants to save money, they should take a look at some of their six-figure executive expense accounts. All those lawsuits can't be cheap, either. ↗

— Jeff Tweedy

#branded #cheap #either #executive #expense

I tried for a while to be an agricultural worker and was hopelessly bored. I would stand around in heaps of manure and sing about the beauty of the work I wasn't doing. ↗

— Theodore Bikel

#agricultural #around #beauty #bored #doing

I think the thinking is, in the comic books, I should pack as much onto a page as possible, because, you know, it's kind of the cheaper format, and you want to give readers as much as you can for their dollar. ↗

— Chester Brown

#books #cheaper #comic #comic books #dollar

If you want to say it with flowers, a single rose says: 'I'm cheap!' ↗

— Delta Burke

#flowers #i #rose #say #says