How can I trust that the Bible is reliable?

Jesus and spirituality can easily become therapies that merely help us cope with life. They can serve us if we chose Him over other service providers. We even talk about "making Jesus my personal Lord and Savior," as if we could make Him anything!

The power of God unto salvation is not our passion for God, but the passion He has exhibited toward us sinners by sending his own Son to redeem us.

If we think the main mission of the church is to improve life in Adam and add a little moral strength to this fading evil age, we have not yet understood the radical condition for which Christ is such a radical solution.

The key to maturity is time and community. Discernment and godly wisdom develop in a community that spans generations. The church is called to be this place where the [God's] Spirit uses normal patterns and rhythms of the Christian life in a community, so that we may bear fruit like a well-watered tree. Despite common appearances, the church is the place where God's new creation is coming into existence and being sustained by the Spirit like a great vineyard.

When salvation is viewed as man's program, it is left up to man as to whether he will let God do this or that, but when it is viewed as God's program, there is a confidence and a certainty that no one whom God regenerates will be a carnal Christian.

To preach the Bible as 'the handbook for life,' or as the answer to every question, rather than as the revelation of Christ, is to turn the Bible into an entirely different book. This is how the Pharisees approached Scripture, as we can see clearly from the questions they asked Jesus. For the Pharisees, the Scriptures were a source of trivia for life's dilemmas.