We are to be strong in faith, and soft in love.

The Bible isn’t about people trying to discover God, but about God reaching out to find us.

The purpose of prayer is emphatically not to bend God's will to ours, but rather to align our will to his.

The meaning of atonement is not to be found in our penitence evoked by the sight of Calvary, but rather in what God did when in Christ on the cross He took our place and bore our sin.

Christian people should surely have been in the vanguard of the movement for environmental responsibility, because of our doctrines of creation and stewardship. Did God make the world? Does he sustain it? Has he committed its resources to our care? His personal concern for his own creation should be sufficient to inspire us to be equally concerned.

I have sometimes called this 'double listening'. Listening to the voice of God in Scripture, and listening to the voices of the modern world, with all their cries of anger, pain and despair.

Our Christian life began not with our decision to follow Christ but with God's call to us to do so.