“In the Fourth Gospel there is a strange paradox. The great text in John 3:16 says that ‘God so loved the world the world that He gave his only Son.’ Then the gospel goes on, ‘God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.’ In John 12:47 Jesus says, ‘I did not come to judge the world but to save the world.’ But in this very same gospel Jesus says, ‘For judgment I came into this world.’ ‘The Father judges no one but has given all judgment to the Son.’ How indeed is a paradox. And yet there is no mystery-mongering. It is often possible to offer a man something in sheer love and for that something to yet be a judgment on the man. Suppose we are very fond of great drama or of great music. We have a friend with whom we wish to share these precious things. We take him to a great play or to hear a fmous orchestra. He figets and is obviously bored. He has passed a judgment on himself. It was sheer affection which prompted us to offer him this experience; it was given in love and yet it was a judgment.”
“In the Middle Ages there was a great scholar called Muretus. He was, as most scholars were, very poor. He wandered from place to place teaching and learning. He fell seriously ill in a certain Italian city. No one knew who he was and he was regarded as simply a vagrant without resources. The doctors were discussing his case and they were suggesting that, since hw as obviously of no use to anyone, it did not matter what happened to him anyway. They were speaking in Latin, the scholar’s language, never dreaming that he understood; and when they finished he looked up and said, ‘Call no man worthless for whom Christ died.’”
"We must remember two things. First, if the Church were a place for perfect people there would be no members at all. Second, as has been said long ago, what really matters is not so much where a man is as the direction in which he is facing. The Church must remain a mixture but if she is acting as the physician of Christ, and the people in her are facing the right direction, facing Christ, then the fact that she is a mixture is her glory and not her condemnation.
“One of the supreme faults in any sphere of human experience is to take one type of experience and insist that it alone is the pattern to which all other experience must conform. It is a great disaster, and somtimes a tragedy, that conversion has been so often associated with something which happens as suddenly as a lightning flash.”
