Legalistic remorse says, "I broke God's rules," while real repentance says, "I broke God's heart."

God's grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver.

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.

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

The resurrection was God's way of stamping PAID IN FULL right across history so that nobody could miss it.

The issue on which everything hangs is not whether you like His teaching but if He ‪rose from the dead.

A genuinely persuasive argument does not merely tell you that you are wrong about everything. It doesn't just beat on you from the outside. It comes inside your belief system, as it were, and affirms something you believe strongly. And then it says - well if you believe this (A) then why in the world can't you see that B is true?