The cost of discipleship is to live the life God has given us, serving in mundane ways the people he's put in our path.

The Old Testament does, in fact, seem to make a distinction between the life of a child and the life of a fetus.

God's love for us is uncoerced and so freely given that it does not demand a response. But so freely is it given that it creates freedom in the recipient, so that our response is not one of obligation or duty, nor the returning of a favor, but uncoerced love.

To paraphrase Paul, God often uses the cheesy to confound the sophisticated. He regularly honors those who are confused about his leading as if they have nailed it.

I sometimes wonder whether our churches--living as we do in American death-denying culture, relentlessly smiling through our praise choruses--are inadvertently helping people live not as much in hope as in denial.

I've come to believe that God, in His wisdom, allows martyrdom in every generation in part because, without them, the reality of Christ's death for us becomes increasingly blurry... As we look at [the martyrs], the mist that sometimes enshrouds first-century Golgotha is burned away, and we see...the Lord nailed to the cross.

As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality...for religious liberals and many evangelicals.