“Once a man has the love of Christ in his heart you need not train him to witness; he will do it. He will know the power, the constraint, the motive; everything is already there. It is a plain lie to suggest that people who regard this knowledge of the love of Christ as the supreme thing are useless, unhealthy mystics. The servants of God who have most adorned the life and this history of the Christian church have always been men who have realized that this is the most important thing of all, and they have spent hours in prayer seeking His face and enjoying His love. The man who knows the love of Christ in his heart can do more in one hour than the busy type of man can do in a century.”

“[The church] is a sinful community. It is, during most of its history, a weak, divided, and unsuccessful community. But because it is the community that lives by and bears witness to the risen life of the crucified Lord, it is the place where the reign of God is actually present and at work in the midst of history, and where the mission of Jesus is being accomplished…the reign of God is present in the midst of this sinful, weak, and divided community, not through any power or goodness of its own, but because God has called and chosen this company of people to be the bearers of his gift on behalf of all people.”

“We do not approach people to call them out of happiness and assign them to a ritualistic, grim existence in which they please God by mere duty. We reach out to lost people to tell them that they are letting their inferior principles drive their appetites and passions, and that if they continue to do so, this pattern will lead them infinitely and unalterably far from the presence of God. It is not pleasure and happiness that they need to give up; it is sin, and the sinfully oriented pleasures that they seek. We call them to repent of these ways, to forsake sin, and to trust Jesus Christ, the Savior who waits to lead them into pleasures evermore (Psalms 16:11).”

“Evangelical theology, from my perspective, insists that the church has a fundamentally spiritual mission; yet this is a mission that is realized not in withdrawal or detachment from the afflictions and the conflicts of humanity but in the very midst of these afflictions.”