In a smaller church your pastoring sets up your preaching. In a larger church your preaching sets up your pastoring.

All life-changing love is inconvenient.

We tend to see God as a means through which we get things to make us happy. For most of us, He has not become our happiness.

In the church we have to deliberately let ourselves be transparent and accountable to others. We're a family.

God's grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver. From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No one who is seriously wronged can “just forgive” the perpetrator.

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

Christians necessarily believe we depend on God for everything-a prayerless Christian, then, is a contradiction in terms.