Look, if you don't have a bad attitude and lots of things wrong with you, no serious person is going to be interested. If you feel scared, outraged, confused most of the time, come on over. Have a seat.

We won't love you if you're perfect.

We hire for perfect, we manage for perfect, we measure for perfect, and we reward for perfect. So why are we surprised that people spend their precious minutes of self-directed, focused work time trying to achieve perfect? The problem is simple: Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about. Rough

The main thing between you and God is not so much your sins; it's your damnable good works.

Although I never lack the presence and plain image of my own wretched infirmity, yet seeing sin so manifestly abounds in all estates, I am compelled to thunder out the threatenings of God against the obstinate rebels.

In the preaching of the kingdom, law and gospel come together. The coming of the kingdom is the coming of a King to enforce his law on a disobedient world, that is, to enforce his covenant against covenant-breakers. But the King who comes is full of love and forgiveness. So his coming is good news, gospel, not only because he judges the wicked, but because he brings redemption, forgiveness, and reward to his redeemed people.

The Gospel addresses men as guilty, condemned, perishing criminals. It declares that the most chaste moralist is in the same terrible plight as is the most voluptuous profligate; and the zealous professor, with all his religious performances, is no better off than the most profane infidel. The Gospel contemplates every descendant of Adam as a fallen, polluted, hell-deserving and helpless sinner. The grace which the Gospel publishes is his only hope.

Because one stage of depravity is lower than another, this does not warrant the denial that the first stage is degraded. The development of wickedness is one thing; the presence of any measure of holiness or virtue is another. The absence of certain forms of sins does not imply any innate purity. It might as well be affirmed that a recent corpse, which is less loathsome, is therefore less dead than one which is far gone in decay and putrefaction.

The total depravity of human nature does not mean that it actually breaks forth into open acts of all kinds of evil in any one man.

Until we really behold the horror of the pit in which by nature we lie, we can never properly appreciate Christ's so-great salvation.

But under the righteous government of God no one is wretched who does not deserve to be so. The objects of mercy, then, are those who are miserable, and all misery is the result of sin, hence the miserable are deserving of punishment not mercy. To speak of deserving mercy is a contradiction of terms.

Until we really behold the horror of the pit in which by nature we lie, we can never properly appreciate Christ's so-great salvation. In man's fallen condition we have the awful disease for which divine redemption is the only cure, and our estimation and valuation of the provisions of divine grace will necessarily be modified in proportion as we modify the need it was meant to meet.