We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.

We must understand that God does not "love" us without liking us - through gritted teeth - as "Christian" love is sometimes thought to do. Rather, out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self-renewed being, the heavenly Father cherishes the earth and each human being upon it. The fondness, the endearment, the unstintingly affectionate regard of God toward all his creatures is the natural outflow of what he is to the core - which we vainly try to capture with our tired but indispensable old word "love".

The sinner is not the one who uses a lot of grace... The saint burns grace like a 747 burns fuel on take off.

What we think is, in the adult person, very much a matter of what we allow ourselves to think, and what we feel is very much a matter of what we allow ourselves to feel. Moreover, what we think is very much a matter of what we wish and seek to think, and what we feel is very much a matter of what we wish and seek to feel. In short, the condition of our mind is very much a matter of the direction in which our will is set.

When the light comes into a room, we do not have to say, "Now what are we going to do about the darkness?" It's gone!

It would be of course a low voltage spiritual life in which prayer was chiefly undertaken as a discipline, rather than as a way of co-labouring with God to accomplish good things and advancing his Kingdom purposes.

We renovate the heart by, of course, changing it, but we can't do that, really, without changing the other essential parts of the human personality.