1. The hardest thing you and I will ever be called to do is to believe that it is done already, that it really and truly is finished.
  2. If you interpret James, as most do, as an encouragement toward proving your faith by your works and then say it is your "favorite" then you are proclaiming that your favorite thing about the Christian faith is the practical outworking, the proving your faith by your works.
  3. When I finished this book, I loved the Bible, and the Bible’s author, even more. And I can’t imagine a better endorsement than that.
  4. Even if the numbers are bad, the news about Jesus crucified for sinners and raised to new life hasn’t become any less good.
  5. There is a revival, no less real and even more definitive, taking place in every church, every weekend, where God’s people gather around his gifts.
  6. A Christian is a man who desires to enter heaven not through his own goodness and works, but through the righteousness and works of Christ.
  7. Reading includes, on some level, striving. Hearing, on the other hand, remains passive.
  8. To believe God is love and thus loves you is a miracle wrought by the Holy Spirit.
  9. Zephaniah has given us something more visceral to help us understand the love of God: the sound of salvation.
  10. This sermon was originally given at Luther Seminary chapel on May 20, 1986.
  11. We too are God’s baptized, beloved, blood-bought believers. And no one can ever take that away from us.
  12. Predestination, Jim knew, is no longer a frightening doctrine of mystery when you understand that God makes his choice about you in the simple word of God, given from one sinner to another.