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384c242
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I say no when I should say yes. I say yes when I should say no. I stumble into holy moments not realizing where I am until they are over. I love poorly, then accidently say the right thing at the right moment without even realizing it, then forget what matters, then show tenderness when it's needed, and then turn around and think of myself way too often.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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4b491bc
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Again and again Jesus had said they should preach forgiveness of sins in his name. Maybe Judas was destined to betray Jesus. Maybe it couldn't have gone down in any other way than it did. But maybe Judas chose death too soon. Maybe he didn't avail himself of the means of God's grace, and maybe his community never sought him out and offered it. Maybe extending the Word of God's forgiveness to Judas was simply too painful for the disciples ..
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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18326cb
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The Bible is not God. The Bible is simply the cradle that holds Christ. Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply does not have the same authority.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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9cbce18
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I have come to realize that all the saints I've known have been accidental ones -- people who inadvertently stumbled into redemption like they were looking for something else at the time, people who have just a wee bit of a drinking problem and manage to get sober and help others to do the same, people who are as kind as they are hostile.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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c678fbb
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Until I face the difficulty of that question and come up, as Philip did, with no good answer... until then, I can only look at the seemingly limited space under the tent and think either it's my job to change people so they fit or it's my job to extend the roof so that they fit. Either way, it's misguided because it's not my tent. It's God's tent. The wideness of the tent of the Lord is my concern only insofar as it points to the gracious n..
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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31e99d3
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It's about spiritual physics. Something has to die for something new to live.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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56faeb2
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And to say "Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy" is to lay our hope in the redeeming work of the God of Easter as though our lives depended on it. Because they do. It means that we are an Easter people, a people who know that resurrection, especially in and among the least likely people and places, is the way that God redeems even the biggest messes we make"
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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6ee956a
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This community will disappoint them. It's a matter of when, not if. We will let them down or I'll say something stupid and hurt their feelings. I then invite them on this side of their inevitable disappointment to decide if they'll stick around after it happens. If they choose to leave when we don't meet their expectations, they won't get to see how the grace of God can come in and fill the holes left by our community's failure, and that's ..
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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982ee5d
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If becoming a person of faith were more like, say, receiving a personality transplant, life would be easier.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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e017e66
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Some would say that instead of the cross being about Jesus standing in for us to take the really bad spanking from God for our own naughtiness (the fancy theological term for this is substitutionary atonement), what happens at the cross is a "blessed exchange." God gathers up all our sin, all our broken-ass junk, into God's own self and transforms all that death into life. Jesus takes our crap and exchanges it for his blessedness."
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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8e57215
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Unitarians just don't talk much about our need for God's grave. They have a higher opinion of human beings than I have ever felt comfortable claiming, as someone who both reads the paper and knows the condition of my own heart.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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2b43cf5
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But then at two a.m. I was startled awake with what can only be described as a bitch slap from the Holy Spirit.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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69bcc0c
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Once a seminary student asked to shadow me for two days to see what my life as a pastor was like. At the end, he said, "Oh my gosh, you're basically a person for a living." --
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pastoral-ministry
pastoring
vocation
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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0919d0a
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I'm surprisingly unconcerned with what people in my church believe. Belief is going to be influenced by all sorts of things that I have nothing to do with, so I don't feel responsible for that. I'm responsible for what they hear -- and hearing the gospel, the good news about who God is, slowly forms us over time.
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pastors
preaching
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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4b8eb7b
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Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it." Damn."
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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22c1605
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In a way, I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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2549cfa
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Any identity other than child of God is spiritually meaningless.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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8f42821
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It doesn't feel very difficult to draw a direct line between the messages many of us received from the church and the harm we've experienced in our bodies and spirits as a result. So my argument in this book is this: we should not be more loyal to an idea, a doctrine, or an interpretation of a Bible verse than we are to . If the teachings of the church are harming the bodies and spirits of people, we should rethink those teachings.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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ca5bf99
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Having said that, if you want a community like the one you've just read about, I bet you are not the only one in your town who feels this way. So do what we did: Gather a small number of people once a month to simply share a meal and pray together. Talk about your lives and what is happening in the world. Be yourselves. Extend grace. Read the gospel...and repeat. (Since ancient times, saints and sinners have called this mysteriously transfo..
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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f77be0d
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The religiosity of the prohibition movement was stoked by a genuine desire to lead holy lives pleasing to God. But purity is easier to regulate than holiness.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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3e72a4e
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But here's the problem with capital total abstinence: when our country made drinking illegal and instilled fear in children about the evils of alcohol, it led, not to increase of holiness, but to a culture of secrecy, hypocrisy, and double standards.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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a8b6e47
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If the Gospel is where we find healing from the harm done to us by the messages of the church, then it must also be where we find freedom. Meaning that even if it is the last thing I want to do, I absolutely have to believe the Gospel is powerful enough, transgressive enough, beautiful enough to heal not only the ones who have been hurt but also those who have done the hurting.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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4749081
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I need a place to confess that I don't have everything figured out. Christianity is not a program for avoiding mistakes; it is a faith of the guilty. There is no "right" or perfect way to be. We learn from our mistakes; we extend grace to others and ourselves. In the same way a lover who loves your body allows you to have grace for it, so is grace the antithesis of rejection."
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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f3eca36
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So if God's first move is to give us our identity, then the devil's first move is to throw that identity into question. Identity is like the tip of a spool of thread, which when pulled, can unwind the whole
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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f811b01
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There are times when I hear my name, turn, and recognize Jesus. There are times when faith feels like a friendship with God. But there are many other times when it feels more adversarial or even vacant. Yet none of that matters in the end. How we feel about Jesus or how close we feel to God is meaningless next to how God acts upon us. How God indeed enters into our messy lives and loves us through them, whether we want God's help or not. An..
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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09245e2
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I'm not running after Jesus. Jesus is running my ass down.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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8022a85
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Our scars are part of our story, but they are not its conclusion. The past is ours and will always be a part of us, and yet it is not all there is. It's a process, moving from wounds to scars to grief to showing those scars. It takes time, and maybe therapy, and maybe being vulnerable in community, and maybe working through the twelve steps, and maybe making a lot of mistakes, and maybe experiencing a tiny bit of joy.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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52d6970
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It is next to impossible in isolation to manufacture the beautiful, radical grace that flows from the heart of God to God's broken and blessed humanity. As
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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d6d3e29
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the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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93aa650
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Every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.
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lutheran
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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82c705e
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Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God's grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word. My selfishness is not the end-all... instead, it's that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit. Grace isn't about God creating humans as flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to..
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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abf4959
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the Christian faith, while wildly misrepresented in so much of American culture, is really about death and resurrection. It's about how God continues to reach into the graves we dig for ourselves and pull us out, giving us new life, in ways both dramatic and small.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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86b54bf
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What Mary would do is show up and remind us that despite the violence and fear, it's still always worth it to love God and to love people. And always, always, it is worth it to sing alleluia in defiance of the devil, who surely hates the sound of it.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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98b2e57
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Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Jesus always seems to be pairing God's forgiveness of us with our forgiveness of others. But why? Growing up, I thought it was a way of guilting us into forgiving others, like Jesus was saying, Hey, I died for you and you can't even be nice to your little brother? As though God can get us to do the right thing if God can just make us feel bad about how much we owe God. But that is ..
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religion
manipulation
guilt
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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c9d8484
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So are demons forces that are totally external to us who seek to defy God? Are they just the shadow side of our own souls? Are they social constructions from a premodern era? Bottom line: Who cares? I don't think demons are something human reason can put its finger on. Or that human faith can resolve. I just know that demons, whether they be addictions or actual evil spirits, are not what Jesus wants for us, since basically every time he en..
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jesus
faith
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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bb1c5ea
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That's the crazy thing about Christianity -- the idea that the finite can contain the infinite. After all, what is the incarnation if not that? So there's an incredible physicality to the spiritual within the Christian story. There's not this weird sort of Greek separation, where there's a higher spiritual world and a corrupted, bad world of flesh. It's all one. Because if God chose to have a body, there's a way in which spiritual things ..
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physicality
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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9df0c68
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My selfishness is not the end-all... instead, it's that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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635dc6d
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The Kingdom of God is a tricky concept, and I was always taught it referred to our heavenly reward for being good, which, now that I actually read the Bible for myself, makes very little sense. Others say that the Kingdom of God is another way of talking about the church, and still others say that it's the dream God has for the wholeness of the world, a dream being made true little by little among us right here, right now. My answer? All of..
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christianity
jesus
faith
god
lutheran
kingdom-of-god
christian-faith
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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de16327
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I cared about Ben, but I was never in love with him. I was in love with what it said about me that I had a boyfriend like Ben, and that's just different.
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romance
christianity
love
girlfriend
growing-up
in-love
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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eeb95eb
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And with an openness that felt like spiritual waterboarding (Jesus holding my head under the waters of my own baptism until I cry uncle), I had a long conversation with my enemy.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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7d30590
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No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don't continually improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are made new, but that's different from spiritual self-improvement.
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christianity
spirituality
pastor-ross-merkel
sermon
god-s-grace
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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f094a5e
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This, to me, is the point of the confession and absolution in the liturgy. When I first experienced it--the part where everyone in church stands up and says what bad people they are, and the pastor, from the distance of the chancel and the purity of her white robe says, "God forgives you"--I thought it was hogwash. Why should I care if someone says to me that some God I may or may not really believe in has erased the check marks against me ..
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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3a507a6
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The beauty of our sky is really just a nice way for the earth to protect us from the terror of what's so vast and unknowable beyond. The boundlessness of the universe is disturbing when you think about it. It's too big and we're too small.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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5100ae2
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mean, if Jesus was vulnerable to temptation, the rest of us certainly are, whether it be temptation to self-loathing or self-aggrandizement, depression or pride, self-destruction or self-indulgence. We are tempted to doubt our innate value precisely to the degree that we are insecure about our identity from, and our relationship to, God.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |