Life in Christ frees us to build intimacy with integrity
Without freedom, love is impossible. And as I said a couple of weeks ago, without freedom, true repentance is impossible. This is the same thing, of course, because true repentance involves opening ourselves in love of God, a willingness to throw ourselves into the open arms of Christ.
There is a place for force, but that place is only within ourselves. God will not force us into good, and he will not force us to… [ read more ]
St Theophan the Recluse said that, “Most people are like a shaving of wood which is curled round its central emptiness.”
Much of my life — and I assume, much of life for many of us — is directed at trying to fill that emptiness. The question to ask of ourselves, of course, is How? How do we do it? We all have instinctive, unconscious ways of doing it, ways that we have been practising… [ read more ]
Why freedom is essential to repentance.
Jesus said “Everyone who practices sin is the slave of sin!” (Jn 8:34). This is true of all sin. We have seen in our extended discussion of pornography and addiction how easy it is to become a slave of sexual sin, and specifically how that slavery eats away at our freedom, and at the same time increasingly degrades and destroys the likeness of God in us — though the… [ read more ]
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