That's the illusion - the idea that you can be all right on the inside and not act it out - and it has affected us in many ways. That's a part of the idea that professing is enough.

Why doesn't God just force us to do the things he knows to be right? It is because that would lose precisely that which he has intended in our creation: freely chosen character.

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.

What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is.

Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about.

He [Peter after the resurrection] now understood that he and the church were to exercise a transcendent power that did not depend upon having a kingdom or government in any human sense, for it was literally a "God government" in which they were participants (Acts 1:6-8).

Repent, for the kingdom of the heavens is at hand' (Matt 3:2, 4:17, 10:7). This is a call for us to reconsider how we have been approaching our life, in light of the fact that we now, in the presence of Jesus, have the option of living within the surrounding movements of God's eternal purposes, of taking our life into his life.