What you present as the gospel will determine what you present as discipleship. If you present as the gospel what is essentially a theory of the atonement, and you say, If you accept this theory of the atonement, your sins are forgiven, and when you die you will be received into heaven, there is no basis for discipleship.

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

Does Christ commend the famous 'apathy' of the Stoic or the Buddhist elimination of desire? Far from it. The issue is not just feeling or desire, but right feeling or desire, or being controlled by feeling or desire.

The Spiritual disciplines are wisdom and not righteousness.

When we pass through what we call death, we do not loose the world. Indeed, we see it for the first time as it really is.

Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.

The people to whom we minister and speak will not recall 99 percent of what we say to them, but they will never forget the kind of persons we are.