Let me be clear that I'm not God so I can't tell you who is and isn't going to heaven. What I know about my relationship with Christ is that as a believer, I am eternally secure. I gave my heart to Christ and that gift of salvation is irrevocable.
When such as I cast out remorse; So great a sweetness flows into the breast; We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blessed.
Friends now fast sworn,
Whose double bosoms seems to wear one heart,
Whose hours, whose bed, whose meal and exercise
Are still together, who twin, as 'twere, in love,
Unseparable, shall within this hour,
On a dissension of a doit, break out
To bitterest enmity; so fellest foes,
Whose passions and whose plots have broke their sleep
To take the one the other, by some chance,
Some trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends
And interjoin their issues.
If any of you would bring judgment the unfaithful wife, let him also weight the heart of her husband in scales, and measure his soul with measurements.
I would not exchange the sorrows of my heart for the joys of the multitude. And I would not have the tears that sadness makes to flow from my every part turn into laughter. I would that my life remain a tear and a smile.
The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.
The Armful For every parcel I stoop down to seize I lose some other off my arms and knees, And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns, Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once Yet nothing I should care to leave behind. With all I have to hold with hand and mind And heart, if need be, I will do my best. To keep their building balanced at my breast. I crouch down to prevent them as they fall; Then sit down in the middle of them all. I had to drop the armful in the road And try to stack them in a better load.
What have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed.
Certainly anyone who comes to faith in Christ has a new heart and they have an opportunity for new life and that's a wonderful thing. But it doesn't say anywhere in that passage that the people didn't still struggle with temptation or that they never fell prey to that sin again whether it was the issue of homosexuality or any of the other things that are listed there.
Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercises, even over the appearance of external objects. Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.
Kindliness, friendliness, the courtesy of the heart, are ever-flowing streams of non egoistic impulses, and have given far more powerful assistance to culture than even those much more famous demonstrations which are called pity, mercy, and self-sacrifice.