We're concerned with how things turn out; God seems more concerned with how we turn out.

Life with God is an individual matter, and general formulas do not easily apply.

Jesus was a master of grace: he attracted sinners and moral outcasts even as he offended the religious and responsible people of his day.

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.

Individuals and societies are not helpless victims of heredity. We have the power to change - not by looking "down" to nature but "up" to God, who consistently calls us forward to become the people we were designed to be. A confused world urgently needs a model of what that looks like. If Christians fail to provide that model, who will?

Jesus never met a disease he could not cure, a birth defect he could not reverse, a demon he could not exorcise. But he did meet skeptics he could not convince and sinners he could not convert. Forgiveness of sins requires an act of will on the receiver's part, and some who heard Jesus' strongest words about grace and forgiveness turned away unrepentant.

We do well to remember that the Bible has far more to say about how to live during the journey than about the ultimate destination.