Have you noticed how a beautiful devotion can quietly calcify? What began as humility becomes self-righteousness when we measure others by our disciplines. Prudence can harden into fear; zeal can lurch into judgement; faithfulness can be recast as moral superiority. The tempter does not invent sin so much as dress it up in the robes of virtue. We applaud what looks holy: the difficult fast, the hard rule kept, the doctrine defended, and forget the root: did this make us more tender toward God and neighbour, or more proud and exclusive?
Much Grace Publications