Grace is not just about forgiveness but about life.

To allow lust (or strong desires) to govern our life is to exalt our will over God's.

Paul followed Jesus by living as He lived. And how did he do that? Through activities and ways of living that would train his whole personality to depend upon the risen Christ as Christ trained Himself to depend upon the Father.

In a world apart from God, the power of denial is absolutely essential if life is to proceed. The will or spirit cannot-psychologically cannot-sustain itself for any length of time in the face of what it clearly acknowledges to be the case. Therefore it must deny and evade and delude itself.

The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength? ... If it fails to set a lovable God--a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being--before ordinary people, we have gone wrong

Why doesn't God just force us to do the things he knows to be right? It is because that would lose precisely that which he has intended in our creation: freely chosen character.

Jesus offers himself as God's doorway into the life that is truly life. Confidence in him leads us today, as in other times, to become his apprentices in eternal living. "Those who come though me will be safe," he said. "They will go in and out and find all they need. I have come into their world that they may have life, and life to the fullest.