People only get in the afterlife what they have most wanted-either to have God as Savior and Master or to be their own Saviors and Masters.

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.

The most liberating act of free, unconditional grace demands that the recipient give up control of his or her life.

What you do in secret tells you who your God is.

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

When Job was prospering, he prayed. When he was suffering, he still prayed.

A church must be more deeply and practically committed to deeds of compassion and social justice than traditional liberal churches and more deeply and practically committed to evangelism and conversion than traditional fundamentalist churches. This kind of church is profoundly counter-intuitive to American observers. It breaks their ability to categorize (and dismiss) it as liberal or conservative. Only this kind of church has any chance in the non-Christian west.