Religion says earn your life. Secular society says create your life. Jesus says, 'My life for your life.

To take a person out of slavery takes an instant. To take slavery out of a person takes a process.

We are free to fight sin, and free to win; but we must still fight.

Faith in the gospel restructures our motivations, our self-understanding, our identity, and our view of the world. Behavioral compliance to rules without heart-change will be superficial and fleeting… We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our hearts. We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting it and making it part of ourselves. That is how we grow.

To fear the Lord is to be overwhelmed with wonder before the greatness of God and his love.

Prayer gives us relief from the melancholy burden of self-absorption .

It seems almost oxymoronic to believe that this new idealism has led to a new pessimism about marriage, but that is exactly what has happened. In generations past there was far less talk about "compatibility" and finding the ideal soul mate. Today we are looking for someone who accepts us as we are and fulfills our desires, and this creates an unrealistic set of expectations that frustrates both the searchers and the searched for.