Your mind will really talk to you when you begin to deny fulfillment to your desires, and you will find how subtle and shameless it is.

We cannot handle injustice by finding more ways to impose what is in fact "right" on people. It has to come from the inside. And that's where the church should be working.

Discipline, strictly speaking, is activity carried on to prepare us indirectly for some activity other than itself. We do not practice the piano to practice the piano well, but to play it well.

Projects of personal transformation rarely succeed by accident, drift, or imposition.

All of the spiritualities that are now clamoring for attention, from explicit Satanism to what we hear on Oprah, are concerned with the two issues of identity and empowerment. Who am I? How can I have the power to live? Those are the questions everyone has to deal with. If we don't come to terms with these, we lapse into some form of human decadence and failure.

Many Christians were suddenly prepared to look at traditional methods of spiritual formation. They could not help but see that spiritual growth and vitality stem from what we actually do with our lives, from the habits we form, and from the character that results.

What is reality? The answer Jesus gives to this question is: God and his kingdom. That is what you can count on and what you have to come to terms with.