There is tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me.

I am graven on the palms of His hands. I am never out of His mind. All my knowledge of Him depends on His sustained initiative in knowing me. I know Him, because He first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, One who loves me; and there is no moment when His eye is off me, or His attention distracted for me, and no moment, therefore, when His care falters.

What we do every time we pray is to confess our impotence and God's sovereignty.

The Life of true holiness is rooted in the soil of awed adoration

It is not for us to imagine that we can prove the truth of Christianity by our own arguments; nobody can prove the truth of Christianity except the Holy Spirit, by his own almighty work of renewing the blinded heart. It is the sovereign prerogative of Christ's Spirit to convince men's consciences of the truth of Christ's gospel; and Christ's human witnesses must learn to ground their hopes of success not on clever presentation of the truth by man, but on powerful demonstration of the truth by the Spirit.

One of the many divine qualities of the Bible is that it does not yield its secrets to the irreverent and the censorious.

Today, on our own turf, we face pagan ignorance about God every bit as deep as that which the early church faced in the Roman Empire.