Reversal

The diagnosis of the world’s sickness (and, therefore, of the individuals who comprise the world) is that the power to love has been wrongly directed. It has either been turned in upon itself or wrongly given to the wrong things. The outward symptoms, and the results, of this misdirection are plainly obvious (at least in other people) in what we call “sin” or “selfishness.”

The drastic “conversion” which God-became-Man called for is the reversal of the wrong attitude, the deliberate giving of the whole power to love, first to God, and then to other people. Without this reversal He spoke quite bluntly of a world doomed to destruction. Where it genuinely takes place He spoke plainly of men being able to “know” God, to begin a new quality of living which physical death is powerless to touch.

—J.B. Phillips, Your God Is Too Small