According to the spirit of this age, the ultimate sin is no longer the failure to honor and thank God but the failure to esteem oneself. Self-abasement, not God-abasement, is the evil. And the cry of deliverance is not "O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me?" but "O worthy man that I am, would that I could only see it better"!

History is a conveyor belt of corpses because of Adam's sin.

Why don't people ask us about our hope? The answer is probably that we look as if we hope in the same things they do. Our lives don't look like they are on the Calvary road, stripped down for sacrificial love, serving others with the sweet assurance that we don't need to be rewarded in this life.

What defines us as Christians is not most profoundly that we have come to know him but that he took note of us and made us his own.

I measure Your love for me by the magnitude of the wrath I deserved, and the wonder of Your mercy by putting Christ in my place.

If God's love for his children is to be measured by our health, wealth, and comfort in this life, God hated the apostle Paul.

Taken as a whole, the story of Ruth is one of those signs. It was written to give us encouragement and hope that all the perplexing turns in our lives are going somewhere good. They do not lead off a cliff. In all the setbacks of our lives as believers, God is plotting for our joy.