Elder brothers obey God to get things. They don't obey God to get God himself — in order to resemble him, love him, know him, and delight him.

Tolerance isn't about not having beliefs. It's about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.

There is a direct relationship between a person's grasp and experience of God's grace, and his or her heart for justice and the poor.

If a person has grasped the meaning of God's grace in his heart, he will do justice. If he doesn't live justly, then he may say with his lips that he is grateful for God's grace, but in his heart he is far from him. If he doesn't care about the poor, it reveals that at best he doesn't understand the grace he has experienced, and at worst he has not really encountered the saving mercy of God. Grace should make you just.

Jesus' claims are particularly unnerving, because if they are true there is no alternative but to bow the knee to him.

Even if 80 percent of the population of a country are Christian believers, they will have almost no cultural influence if the Christians do not live in cultural centers and work in culture-forging fields such as academia, publishing, media, entertainment, and the arts. The assumption that society will improve simply be more Christian believers being present is no longer valid.

Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they are guilty of it.