Draw nigh to God, so that you may dread the grave as little as your bed. Draw nigh to God, that you may live a happy and useful life. Drawing nigh to God is the most concentrated energy of the soul. Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.

Our prayers may be an index of how small and self-centered our world is.

You get into theological education and you're busy marking papers and getting into administration in raising funds and doing all the things that are part of life, but here we were talking about important theological, historical, gospel related, biblically centered things hour after hour after hour.

When we suffer, there will sometimes be mystery. Will there also be faith? Yes, if our attention is focused more on the cross, and on the God of the cross, than on the suffering itself.

We are lost when human opinion means more to us than God’s.

The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.

In terms of applicability to today's world, many people are trying to domesticate Scripture so as to get the PC answer, the politically correct answer on a wide range of subjects, whether it's homosexual marriage, or a certain view of government, or a certain view of eschatology or whatever. At the end of the day we want also to encourage the kind of reverent handling of Scripture that wants to be corrected by Scripture, that is more eager to be mastered by Scripture then to master it.