Our problems boil down to one of moral choices. God wanted a world based on moral values, thus He created mankind with the ability to respond to moral choices. Faced with the moral option of living selfishly or unselfishly, people can and do make wrong decisions. We are free to choose, but we reap the consequences of bad moral decisions.

I do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with—the dollar is innocent—but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance.

I never did a thing in all my life, virtuous or otherwise that I didn't repent of within twenty-four hours.

AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.

It is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people.

Sin can bring pleasure, but never happiness.

Today, society does not talk about hell. It's as if it did not exist, but it does. There is eternal punishment for those who sin and do not repent.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar…. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

If life ends at the grave, then it makes no ultimate difference whether you live as a Stalin or as a Mother Teresa. Since your destiny is ultimately unrelated to your behavior, you may as well just live as you please. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it: "If there is no immortality … then all things are permitted.

By God's design, I believe our hearts and minds are shaped by Story. It's how we learn. It's how we make sense of the world. Characters, situations, moral consequences are all around us.