Top 15 Robert H. Meneilly Quotes

You know, if you and I would really want to make a real difference in this world today, to make a real difference for God and good, all we need to do is to learn how, and to begin to discipline ourselves, to treat our neighbors just the way we treat ourselves, would want to be treated. It's that simple and it's that difficult.

The wonder of spontaneous, tough-hearted, uncalculated, discipline, and unexpected love, that's living. True kindness never stops for one moment to calculate the cost of time, of money, of inconvenience, or even danger, but jumps to the aid of a neighbor, even an enemy. Love for neighbor is ever ready. And once we get it going, it keeps going and going and going.

Good neighborliness is really the common denominator by which we can all live together in harmony in a world of difference. Love is the only thing that tears down those walls that tend to separate us neighbor from neighbor, and bridges all the gaps between religions, races, cultures, and economies.

Now honest down-to-earth tough love is the only virtue that I know of that's guaranteed never to fail. We often fail loving, but love never fails.

Now if the greatest single power in a democratic republic is the power of a single vote, then the greatest power any human being has on this earth is love. Love for God. Certainly, love for self. And love for our neighbor. And when I talk of love today, I'm not talking of that simple, sentimental, otherworldly, ethereal kind of love. I'm thinking of a kind of love with which God loves every last one of us. It's the kind of love that transforms the human personality. It addresses the will. And it molds the human mind. And the love of which I speak today actually instills holy habits even in the least of us.

The deepest religious concern on this earth today is being a good neighbor. The most crucial political issue in the world today is learning how to do rightly neighbor-with-neighbor. The greatest social urgency is learning how to be a good neighbor to one another. And certainly the most crucial concern of our global economy, call it economic justice, is caring about our neighbors simply the same way we care about ourselves.

If we love God, we can't help but love our neighbors because we're going to respect them as our brothers and sisters. In fact, folks, if you stop to think about it, the only way in this world any of us has of loving God is by loving our neighbors.

Mr. Truman excised the best of the Good Neighbor policy when he sent the very first civil rights message to the Congress of the United States and desegregated the Armed Forces. Folks, I think on this day in honoring Mr. Truman with that civil rights move, we need to all acknowledge the fact that we do have our prejudices, systemic prejudices, within each one of us. When we will honestly acknowledge those prejudices that we have, when we're in touch with those feelings, then it is that we can begin to discipline ourselves to love our neighbors with different pigments, and cultures, and races, and yes economics.

Healing and saving the creation is God's work, and he calls faithful persons to be co-creators with him.

Only love for God and God's good earth will keep our attention and move us to commitment. Nature is rising up to judge us Nature is striking back to call us to repentance.

We must reclaim a sense of reverence for the earth and a recognition of our essential relatedness to the earth.

Until we Christians see that the Gospel's good news of redemption applies to the earth, as well as the earthling, we will proliferate the sin of raping God's good earth. God's work of redemption in Jesus Christ encompasses the whole of creation and provides the grounds for restoring the brokenness in the relationship of humankind to creation, and the relationship of both to God.

Secular environmentalists have grounds to blame the Christian forces for the idea of life that will be good after death that they have ignored the consequences of people's irresponsibility with earth.

Would God be concerned with saving a soul, only to have that reborn person live in an impoverished and unhealthy environment? Salvation is a word that means "wholeness." Christ claimed that he came so that everyone might have life more abundantly. Christ's salvation includes the wholeness of the creature and the creation.

Crises get our attention, but only love for God and his earth will hold our attention and move us to saving action.