Lewis Smedes Quotes

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.

You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.

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.

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.

It takes one person to forgive, it takes two people to be reunited.

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.

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.

Forgiving people doesn’t necessarily mean you want to meet them for lunch. It means you try to undo the Velcro hook. Lewis Smedes said it best: “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.

This is where I find myself now on the journey that God and I have been on, at the station called hope, the one that comes right after gratitude and somewhere not far from journey's end. It has been "God and I" the whole way. Not so much because he has always been pleasant company. Not because I could always feel his presence when I got up in the morning or when I was afraid to sleep at night. It was because he did not trust me to travel alone. Personally I liked the last miles of the journey better than the first. But, since I could not have the ending without first having the beginning, I thank God for getting me going and bringing me home. And sticking with me all the way.

If we say that monsters [people who do terrible evil] are beyond forgiving, we give them a power they should never have...they are given the power to keep their evil alive in the hearts of those who suffered most. We give them power to condemn their victims to live forever with the hurting memory of their painful pasts. We give the monsters the last word.

we should keep in mind the difference between sin and tragedy.

We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are. A person feels guilt because he did something wrong. A person feels shame because he is something wrong.

Lewis Smedes sums up the dangers of superficial forgiveness: “We will not take healing action against unfair pain until we own the pain we want to heal. It is not enough to feel pain. We need to appropriate the pain we feel: Be conscious of it, take it on, and take it as our own … I worry about fast forgivers. They tend to forgive quickly in order to avoid their pain.

Unforgiveness is like cancer; it will eat you from the inside out. It is not about the other person and it does not diminish what he's done. But the forgiveness is for me.” “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” ~Lewis B. Smedes Ψ

Healthy anger drives us to do something to change what makes us angry; anger can energize us to make things better. Hate does not want to change things for the better; it wants to make things worse. LEWIS B. SMEDES, FORGIVE AND FORGET: HEALING THE HURTS WE DON’T DESERVE1

HEART ACTION Think about when you are silent about God's activity in your life. Look for a chance this week to speak out about God's goodness. Giving and gratitude go together like humor and laughter, like having one's back rubbed and the sigh that follows, like a blowing wind and the murmur of wind chimes. Gratitude keeps alive the rhythm ofgrace given andgrace grateful, a lively lilt that lightens a heavy world. LEWIS B. SMEDES Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. -MATTHEW 6:9-13 The "Lord's Prayer" is a model for our prayers. It begins with adoration of God (verse 9), acknowledges subjection to His will (verse 10), asks of Him (verses 11-13), and ends with an offering of praise (verse 13). The fatherhood of God toward His children is the basis for Jesus' frequent teaching about prayer. "Your Father knows what you need," Jesus told His disciples, "before you ask Him" (Matthew 6:8). Jesus presents a pattern that the church has followed throughout the

The ethicist and theologian Lewis Smedes, expressing an Augustinian thought, describes the mottled nature of our inner world: Our inner lives are not partitioned like day and night, with pure light on one side of us and total darkness on the other. Mostly, our souls are shadowed places; we live at the border where our dark sides block our light and throw a shadow over our interior places…. We cannot always tell where our light ends and our shadow begins or where our shadow ends and our darkness begins.

I am not fated, I am not determined, I am not a lump of human dough whipped into shape by the contingent reinforcement and aversive conditioning of my past. I know as well as the next person that I cannot create my life de novo; I am well aware that much of what I am and what I do is a gift or a curse from my past. But when I make a promise to anyone I rise above all the conditioning that limits me.

Some people ask who they are and expect their feelings to tell them. But feelings are flickering flames that fade after every fitful stimulus. Some people ask who they are and expect their achievements to tell them. But the things we accomplish always leave a core of character unrevealed. Some people ask who they are and expect visions of their ideal self to tell them. But our visions can only tell us what we want to be, not what we are.

The choice to hang on to bitterness and anger may feel virtuous but has a destructive nature. As the wise theologian Lewis Smedes said, “When we attach our feelings to the moment when we were hurt, we endow it with immortality. And we let it assault us every time it comes to mind. It travels with us, sleeps with us, hovers over us while we make love, and broods over us while we die. Our hate does not even have the decency to die when those we hate die—for it is a parasite sucking our blood, not theirs. There is only one remedy for it; forgiveness.”1

Lewis Smedes points out, “The first and often the 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.

I admit that I often have to hold on to faith by my fingernails. When people I dearly love are in trouble, I sometimes pray for them and then walk away with no real hope that God will actually do something for them. Maybe it is an age thing; maybe I have watched too many people get stuck in the groove of tragedy, with no relief from God that I could see. In any case, I still have to pray for faith in God before I get back my hope for others or myself.

as Lewis Smedes once pointed out, “We have no ideal world in which to find out what God expects us to do; we have only this changing and broken one. . . . And obedience to unchanging commands must adjust to changing conditions.”11 But that in no way implies that the moral and theological guides are themselves relativistic, sometimes binding and at other times not.