That's the secret of Jesus. You watch Jesus and you see he never did "withdraw" and then "attack." All of the time people wanted him to do it and in many ways, but he would not. Then to the body of believers he said, "This will show everyone that you are my disciples, if you love one another," but he had already said, "Love one another as I have loved you." So that's the model.

The aim of spiritual formation is not behavior modification but the transformation of all those aspects of you and me where behavior comes from...Circumcision of the heart.

In the story of the good Samaritan, Jesus not only teaches us to help people in need; more deeply, he teaches us that we cannot identify who “has it”, who is “in” with God, who is “blessed”, by looking at exteriors of any sort. That is a matter of the heart. There alone the kingdom of the heavens and human kingdoms great and small are knit together. Draw any cultural or social line you wish, and God will find his way beyond it.

The main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish. It's the person you become.

Bodily pleasure is not in itself a bad thing. But when it is exalted to a necessity and we become dependent upon it, then we are slaves of our body and its feelings. Only misery lies ahead.

No matter how lost a person is, they still draw on their body. So the body would be more like the motor.

Generally speaking we don't want to hear from the soul. We want it to just do its job. Unfortunately, in a broken world, it also is broken, and we're going to hear from it because many of the ordinary miseries and extraordinary glories of human life are expressions of the state of the soul.