Maintaining joy in God takes 'work'; that is, it's a fight against every impulse for alien joys and every obstacle in the way to seeing and savoring Christ.

Christ is glorified in you when he is more precious to you than all that life can give or death can take.

He has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me that newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valuable for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and opened for me the wisdom of the ages.

One day America and all its presidents will be a footnote in history, but the kingdom of Jesus will never end.

All the money needed to send and support an army of self-sacrificing, joy-spreading ambassadors is already in the church.

Giving is a way of having what you need.

My take on tithing in America is that it's a middle-class way of robbing God. Tithing to the church and spending the rest on your family is not a Christian goal. It's a diversion. The real issue is: How shall we use God's trust fund-namely, all we have-for His glory? In a world with so much misery, what lifestyle should we call our people to live? What example are we setting?