What is the "extraordinary"? It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, love that goes to the cross in suffering obedience.

Consequently there is a need for spiritual vitality. What protection is there against the danger of organisation? Man is once more faced with the problem of himself. He can cope with every danger except the danger of human nature itself. In the last resort it all turns upon man.

God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.

... there are not two realities, but only one reality, and that is the reality of God, which has become manifest in the Christ event/redemption and creation.

The Lord stands above the new day, for God has made it. All restlessness, all worry, and anxiety flee before him.

If our Christianity has ceased to be serious about discipleship, if we have watered down the gospel into emotional uplift which makes no costly demands and which fails to distinguish between natural and Christian existence, then we cannot help regarding the cross as an ordinary everyday calamity, as one of the trials and tribulations of life. We have then forgotten that the cross means rejection and shame as well as suffering .

Just as our love for God begins with listening to God's Word, the beginning of love for other Christians is learning to listen to them.