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.

Unless you have already put God first, for example, what you will have to do to be financially secure, impress other people, or fulfill your desires will invariably lead you against God's wishes. That is why the first of the Ten Commandments, “You shall have no gods who take priority over me,” is the first of the Ten Commandments.

Every church needs to be able to answer two questions. First, what is our plan for making disciples? And second, does our plan work?

Spiritual formation in Christ moves us toward a total interchange of our ideas and images for his.

The relation of redemption and sanctification would be the ongoing relationship between the driver and God who is directing her. Now, if God isn't directing him, he may go wild and do all sorts of things criminal and crazy.

The transformation of the social world is at its heart the transformation of personal relations. That's the key to transforming society in the larger arena.

Many people have found prayer impossible because they thought they should only pray for wonderful but remote needs they actually had little or no interest in or even knowledge of. Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about ‘good things’ that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God’s love.