Salvation ... has its eternal foundation in the love of God.

The confession of the church touching Jesus Christ can never be a knowledge such that, with it, the church can elevate itself above the world. It is precisely within the church that people will have to remind themselves that this knowledge is a gift and a miracle which did not arise out of flesh and blood.

God did not begin to love man when Jesus came. Jesus came to roll back the curtain and show man the heart that was eternal, the love that was always there. Christianity is not God's alteration of attitude toward man. It is not that in the old dispensation He was a policeman, and in this a father. He has always been a father. He never changes.

One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.

Someone else's action can't dictate our response. God sent his Son into a world that hated him. If God had waited for the world to be worthy to receive him, his Son would never have come.

Love is not an emotion; it's a policy and a commitment that we choose to keep in the harshest of circumstances. It's something that can be learned and that we can grow in. Biblical love is not based on the worthiness of the person being loved—none of us deserves Christ's sacrifice—but on the worthiness of the One who calls us to love: "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).

Still seems it strange, that thou shouldst live forever Is it less strange, that thou shouldst live at all This is a miracle and that no more.

In western cultures it's not considered tolerant to insist that the only way of salvation is through the blood of Jesus Christ, which was shed on the cross. Yet that is fact. There is only one way in which we can be saved (John 14:6).

The hope of eternal life is not to be taken up upon slight grounds. It is a subject to be settled between God and your own soul; settled for eternity. A supposed hope, and nothing more, will prove your ruin.

We have to believe in the mercy and grace of God to trigger conversion rather than the other way around: that you're only going to get the mercy if you have a conversion. The economy of salvation doesn't work that way.

Agnostics cannot understand Christ for the same reason a thief find a policeman -they don't want to.

The message of the Bible is not about God in Heaven who wants to take from you. It's about God who wants to give to you.