So Heaven is not our default destination. No one goes there automatically. Unless our sin problem is resolved, the only place we will go is our true default destination . . . Hell.

His life spells living. Your life or my life, apart from Him, spells death.

The Christian faith, simply stated, reminds us that our fundamental problem is not moral; rather, our fundamental problem is spiritual. It is not just that we are immoral, but that a moral life alone cannot bridge what separates us from God. Herein lies the cardinal difference between the moralizing religions and Jesus' offer to us. Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive.

Presence, relationship, holiness, trust, beauty, goodness, peace—all were present in the relationship between God and humanity at creation. By playing God and redefining good and evil according to our own discretion, we introduced into the human spirit disobedience, absence, severance, distrust, evil, and restlessness.

When we have overcome absence with phone calls, winglessness with airplanes, summer heat with air-conditioning—when we have overcome all these and much more besides, then there will abide two things with which we must cope: the evil in our hearts and death.

The Christian faith, simply stated, reminds us that our fundamental problem is not moral; it is spiritual.

the cross is the centerpiece of the gospel message. It is truly the intersection of love and justice, judgment and grace, exactitude and mercy. The demands of the law call for perfection. But the law itself cannot transform the human heart. What this really means is that perfection cannot get us into heaven, but our faith in the Perfect One can. His justice comes hand in hand with love. And neither ever violates the other.

It is not just that we are immoral, but that a moral life alone cannot bridge what separates us from God.

A moral life alone cannot bridge what separates us from God. This is the cardinal difference between the moralizing religions and Jesus' offer to us. Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive.

You can never make a wrong choice and get a right result.

Man's thought is always of the punishment that will come to him if he sins. God's thought is always of the glory man will miss if he sins. God's purpose for redemption is glory, glory, glory.

The great crisis of this seventh age is that there has been a second fall. The first fall led to God's expulsion of human beings from the Garden of Eden. The second fall was when we returned the favor.