In the end, and, if this is, indeed, my end, remember this: Christmas is the story of a Father reaching out to His children. Nothing more. Nothing less.

But if we have this for a foundation truth, that there is more mercy in Christ than sin in us, there can be no danger in thorough dealing. It is better to go bruised into heaven than sound to hell. Therefore let us . . . keep ourselves under this work till sin be the sourest, and Christ the sweetest of all things.

God doesn't wait for you to reach maturity before he starts liking you. He loves and enjoys you at every stage of your spiritual development.

Jesus knelt down by Satan's shrunken form. "Don't you wonder why I didn't kill you?" Smiling, he said, "I'm saving you for the day when you love me. It will come.

God our Father, Jesus, our Elder Brother and our Redeemer, and the Holy Ghost, the Testator, are perfect. They know us best and love us most and will not leave one thing undone for our eternal welfare. Should we not love them for it and honor them first?

Agape doesn't love somebody because they're worthy. Agape makes them worthy by the strength and power of its love. Agape doesn't love somebody because they're beautiful. Agape loves in such a way that it makes them beautiful.

God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.

God does not love some ideal person, but rather human beings just as we are, not some ideal world, but rather the real world.

It is a question of the freedom of God, which finds its strongest evidence precisely in that God freely chose to be bound to historical human beings and to be placed at the disposal of human beings. God is not from human beings but for them.

No abyss of evil can remain hidden from him through whom the world is reconciled to God. But the abyss of the love of God. embraces even the most abysmal godlessness of the world. In an incomprehensible reversal of all righteous and pious thought, God declares himself as guilty toward the world and thereby extinguishes the guilt of the world.

Once a man has truly experienced the mercy of God in his life he will henceforth aspire only to serve.

I have done so for two reasons: First, that we might see the depth of God's love, not only in giving His one and only Son, but in giving Him to die for such people as Paul has described us to be.