There is no cure for the social battles that we fight in our culture - and there's so much grief around race, gender, and so forth - until you eliminate "withdrawal" and "attack" and replace them with "acceptance" and "help." Once you do that and not just talk about it, these other issues will fall into place quickly. They will not fall into place at all unless it is done this way.

I submit my tongue as an instrument of righteousness when I make it bless them that curse me and pray for them who persecute me, even though it "automatically" tends to strike and wound those who have wounded me. I submit my legs to God as instruments of righteousness when I engage them in physical labor as service, perhaps carrying a burden the "second mile" for someone whom I would rather let my legs kick. I submit my body to righteousness when I do my good deeds without letting them be known, though my whole frame cries out to strut and crow.

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.

You have been given a ministry and your ministry is not your job and your job and your ministry are two things and beyond that is your work in life which isn't the same as your ministry and then beyond that is your life. And this is what God is more interested in than your work or your ministry-what He gets out of your life is the person you become. And He has plans for you, and these are long-range plans.

Obedience to Christ is the easy way, take my yoke.

Think of the soul as the computer system that runs the whole thing. And then the spirit is the executive center. It's the faculty of choice. And then you want that faculty governed by the truth of God and the Spirit of God.

In thus sending out his trainees, [Jesus] set afoot a perpetual world revolution: one that is still in process and will continue until God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven.... He has chosen to accomplish this with and, in part, through his students.