If we are right on the inside, we will address these issues straight-forwardly and take a stand on them, and, if necessary, die for them. We will be that committed.

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.

Human beings are at their core defined by what they worship rather than primarily by what they think, know, or believe. That is bound up with the central Augustinian claim that we are what we love.

The needed transformation is very largely a matter of replacing in ourselves those idea systems of evil (and their corresponding cultures) with the idea system that Jesus Christ embodied and taught and with a culture of the kingdom of God.

Spiritual people are not those who engage in certain spiritual practices; they are those who draw their life from a conversational relationship with God.

We don't save our soul and leave our emotions and our feelings and our body and all the rest of it out. That's just a way of talking that emphasizes the soul is so fundamental that we can, in some cases, treat it as the whole person because it actually is the thing that integrates all of these aspects of the self and makes them work together. Now, I don't think we can find a passage in the Bible that says that. We have to read and study how it addresses the soul, and we then see that it is the deepest, most vital part of the human self.

What we can do with these means (our own unassisted strength) is still very small compared to what we could do in acting in union with God himself, who created and ultimately controls all other forces.