Careful obedience to God’s law may serve as a strategy for rebelling against God

Only if you are part of a community of believers seeking to resemble, serve, and love Jesus will you ever get to know him and grow into his likeness.

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.

We get angry when we feel like God owes us a better life than we have.

Jesus Christ as only an example will crush you. You'll never be able to live up to it. But Jesus Christ as the Lamb will save you.

If God wiped out all sources of evil in the world we would no longer be here, the evil is inside us.

Religion operates on the principle 'I obey-therefore I am accepted by God.' But the operating principle of the gospel is 'I am accepted by God through what Christ has done-therefore I obey.'