The gospel is the proclamation of the person and work of Jesus Christ and how those benefits can be applied to us by faith alone.

I do not want to drive across a bridge designed by an engineer who believed the numbers in structural stress models are relative truths.

Before I can call upon Christ as my Savior, I have to understand that I need a savior. I have to understand that I am a sinner. I have to have some understanding of what sin is.I have to understand that God exists. I have to understand that I am estranged from that God, and that I am exposed to that God's judgment. I don't reach out for a savior unless I am first convinced that I need a savior. All of that is pre-evangelism. It is involved in the data or the information that a person has to process with his mind before he can either respond to it in faith or reject it in unbelief.

The whole basis for our relationship with God is rooted and grounded in grace, in that which is not earned.

Loving a holy God is beyond our moral power. The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy god, an idol made by our own hands. Unless we are born of the Spirit of God, unless God sheds His holy love in our hearts, unless He stoops in His grace to change our hearts, we will not love Him... To love a holy God requires grace, grace strong enough to pierce our hardened hearts and awaken our moribund souls.

God doesn't want us to just feel gratitude, but for us to show it by giving thanks to God with our lives.

We have no right to come before God at all, apart from the finished work of Christ.