Christians don't believe that goodness gets you to heaven. Christians believe it's exhausting to rely on your own goodness to please God.

If we can't "love the sinner; hate the sin" then how can we relate to ourselves? Love who we are in Christ but still hate the sin remaining.

Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavors, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God's calling, can matter forever.

The Cross is not simply a lovely example of sacrificial love. Throwing your life away needlessly is not admirable — it is wrong. Jesus’ death was only a good example if it was more than an example, if it was something absolutely necessary to rescue us. And it was. Why did Jesus have to die in order to forgive us? There was a debt to be paid — God himself paid it. There was a penalty to be born — God himself bore it. Forgiveness is always a form of costly suffering.

Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God.

Those who condemn the self-righteous for the sake of self-discovery do so with ironic self-righteousness.

If you come to recognize the beliefs on which your doubts about Christianity are based, and if you seek as much proof for those beliefs as you seek from Christians for theirs - you will discover that your doubts are not as solid as they first appeared.