We preach sermons, write books on apologetics, conduct city-wide evangelistic campaigns. For those alienated from the church, that approach no longer has the same drawing power. And for the truly needy, words alone don't satisfy; "A hungry person has no ears," as one relief worker told me. A skeptical world judges the truth of what we say by the proof of how we live.

People who think they are free eventually end up slaves to their own desires, and those who give their freedom away to the only One you can trust with that freedom eventually get it back.

Rather, God has commissioned us as agents of intervention in the midst of a hostile and broken world.

People instinctively know the difference between something done with a profit motive and something done with a love motive.

Often, it seems, we're [Christians] perceived more as guilt dispensers than as grace dispensers.

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.

God formed an alliance based on the world as it is, full of flaws, whereas prayer calls God to account for the world as it should be.