Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive.

By striving to prove how much they deserve God's love, legalists miss the whole point of the gospel, that it is a gift from God to people who don't deserve it. The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.

Never do I see Jesus lecturing people on the need to accept blindness or lameness as an expression of God's secret will; rather, he healed them.

Having spent time around "sinners" and also around purported saints, I have a hunch why Jesus spent so much time with the former group: I think he preferred their company. Because the sinners were honest about themselves and had no pretense, Jesus could deal with them. In contrast, the saints put on airs, judged him, and sought to catch him in a moral trap. In the end it was the saints, not the sinners, who arrested Jesus.

O God, make the bad people good, and the good people nice

We admit that we will never reach our ideal in this life, a distinctive the church claims that most other human institutions try to deny.

...to see that God does answer, in great things as well as small, the prayers of those who put their trust in Him will strengthen the faith of multitudes.