While Christianity was able to agree with pagan writers that inordinate attachment to earthly goods can lead to unnecessary pain and grief, it also taught that the answer to this was not to love things less but to love God more than anything else. Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope.

If I have the smile of God, all other frowns are inconsequential.

The gospel has two parts. It has the part that says you're a sinner, and it has the part that says you're loved and accepted.

Living is giving....If you spend your money on yourself, you are just surviving. But if you want your life to count, if you want to really live - give.

Let us preach grace till humility just starts to grow in us.

If you add anything to Jesus as a requirement for being happy, that's your real king.

Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially 'deify.' We will look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion, even if we think ourselves as highly irreligious.