One who has been touched by grace will no longer look on those who stray as "those evil people" or "those poor people who need our help." Nor must we search for signs of "loveworthiness." Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.

The Christian knows to serve the weak not because they deserve it but because God extended his love to us when we deserved the opposite. Christ came down from heaven, and whenever his disciples entertained dreams of prestige and power he reminded them that the greatest is the one who serves. The ladder of power reaches up, the ladder of grace reaches down.

Indeed we are all in peril if the flawed messenger invalidates the message.

Pleasure represents a great good but also a grave danger.

The church works best not as a power center, rather as a countercultural community - in the world but not of it - that shows others how to live the most fulfilled and meaningful life on earth. In modern society that means rejecting the false gods of independence, success, and pleasure and replacing them with love for God and neighbor.

Prayer is to the skeptic a delusion, a waste of time. To the believer it represents perhaps the most important use of time.

The more we love, and the more unlikely people we love, the more we resemble God - who, after all, loves ornery creatures like us.