“The will of God, to which the law gives expression, is that men should defeat their enemies by loving them.”

Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.

One act of obedience is worth a hundred sermons.

A love that left people alone in their guilt would not have real people as its object. So, in vicarious responsibility for people, and in His love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one burdened by guilt.

[Christ] is the Mediator, not only between God and man, but between man and man, between man and reality.

We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.

Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

But the Christian also knows that he not only cannot and dare not be anxious, but that there is no need for him to be so. Neither anxiety now work can secure his daily bread, for bread is the gift of the Father.

Advent creates people, new people.

This is the end. For me the beginning of life.

The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise godfearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ.

I wonder why it is that we find some days so much more oppressive than others, for no apparent reason. Is it growing pains – or spiritual trial? Once they’re over, the world looks quite a different place again.

While it is good that we seek to know the Holy One, it is probably not so good to presume that we ever complete the task.

Only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient believes.

The limitation of the ethical phenomenon to its place and time does not imply its rejection but, on the contrary, its validation. One does not use canons to shoot sparrows.

We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace.