Consumer Christianity is now normative. The consumer Christian is one who utilizes the grace of God for forgiveness and the services of the church for special occasions, but does not give his or her life and innermost thoughts, feelings, and intentions over to the kingdom of the heavens. Such Christians are not inwardly transformed and not committed to it.

There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.

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.

Jesus, Willard says, “does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him.

The first act of love is always the giving of attention.

When we receive God's gift of life by relying on Christ, we find that God comes to act with us as we rely on him in our actions.

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.