We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God.
We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior.
A Christian should resemble a fruit tree with real fruit, not a Christmas tree with decorations tied on.
An unchurched christian is a grotesque anomaly. The New Testament knows nothing of such a person. For the church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought. It is not an accident of history. On the contrary, the church is God’s new community.
We are sent into the world, like Jesus, to serve. For this is the natural expression of our love for our neighbors. We love. We go. We serve.
Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love.
In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?
The purpose of prayer is emphatically not to bend God’s will to ours, but rather to align our will to his.
Because in no other person but the historic Jesus of Nazareth has God become man and lived a human life on earth, died to bear the penalty of our sins, and been raised from death and exalted to glory, there is no other Savior, for there is no other person who is qualified to save.
The authority by which the Christian leader leads is not power but love, not force but example, not coercion but reasoned persuasion. Leaders have power, but power is safe only in the hands of those who humble themselves to serve.
Every time we look at the cross Christ seems to say to us, ‘I am here because of you. It is your sin I am bearing, your curse I am suffering, your debt I am paying, your death I am dying.’ Nothing in history or in the universe cuts us down to size like the cross.
Sin and the child of God are incompatible. They may occasionally meet; they cannot live together in harmony.
Grace is love that cares and stoops and rescues.
The major mark of justified believers is joy, especially joy in God himself. We should be the most positive people in the world. For the new community of Jesus Christ is characterized not by a self-centered triumphalism but by a God-centered worship.
Every Christian should be both conservative and radical; conservative in preserving the faith and radical in applying it.
Simplicity is the first cousin of contentment.
The concept of substitution lies at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man.
Greatness in the kingdom of God is measured in terms of obedience.
The Christian’s chief occupational hazards are depression and discouragement.
It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.