In the minds of most people, Christianity is supposed to be about love of God and neighbor (even though it is true that at the heart of Christianity does not lie human love at all, but God's love for humanity24

Love properly understood is God—the font of all creation and the ultimate goal of all desires; God properly understood is love.

God doesn't give in order to acquire. God loves without self-seeking; that's at the heart of who God is. God gives for the benefit of others.

Somebody loves us, too - God Himself. We have been created to love and to be loved.

May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.

Salvation, then, is not "going to heaven" but "being raised to life in God's new heaven and new earth.

What the Gospels offer is not a philosophical explanation of evil—what it is or why it's there—but the story of an event in which the living God deals with it

For Christians it's always a love game ... that He is love itself ... Indeed, some have suggested that one way of understanding the Spirit is to see the Spirit as the personal love which the Father has for the Son and the Son for the Father.

Jesus wasn't just a great character, a hero figure for subsequent generations to look up to. He was announcing good news—something that was happening and has now happened, something that changes the world. And either he was right or he was wrong.

The meaning of the story is found in every detail, as well as in the broad narrative. The pain and tears of all the years were met together on Calvary. The sorrow of heaven joined with the anguish of earth; the forgiving love stored up in God's future was poured out into the present; the voices that echo in a million human hearts, crying for justice, longing for spirituality, eager for relationship, yearning for beauty, drew themselves together into a final scream of desolation.

What Jesus did was not a mere example of something else, not a mere manifestation of some larger truth; it was itself the climactic event and fact of cosmic history. From then on everything is different…the End came forward into the present in Jesus the Messiah

all the future judgment is highlighted basically as good news, not bad. Why so? It is good news, first, because the one through whom God's justice will finally sweep the world is not a hard-hearted, arrogant, or vengeful tyrant but rather the Man of Sorrows, who was acquainted with grief; the Jesus who loved sinners and died for them; the Messiah who took the world's judgment upon himself on the cross.