To suffer and to be happy although suffering, to have one’s feet on the earth, to walk on the dirty and rough paths of this earth and yet to be enthroned with Christ at the Father’s right hand, to laugh and cry with the children of this world and ceaselessly sing the praises of God with the choirs of angels — this is the life of the Christian until the morning of eternity breaks forth.

To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.

To be Christian is to walk with Christ on His way, without dodging Golgotha in the impregnable confidence that the evils that can mark our lives and those of the world are known by Christ, taken in Him in the gift He makes of His life. And that thus they are held in the power of His Resurrection, which delivers us from fear and despair.

A Christian is not someone who expects to spend forever in heaven there. A Christian is someone who anticipates spending forever here, in a new heaven that comes to earth.

A Christian is a believer in Jesus. He believes that if he only throws his own lost and sinful soul on the Redeemer, there is in His sacrifice sufficient merit to cancel all his guilt, and in His heart sufficient love to undertake the keeping of his soul for all eternity. He believes that Jesus is a Saviour. He believes that His heart is set on His people's holiness, and that it is only by making them new creatures, pure-minded, kind-hearted, unselfish, devout, that He can fit them for a home and a life like His own, that He can fit them for the occupations and enjoyments of heaven. And believing all this he prays and labors after holiness.

To be a Christian - a follower of Jesus Christ - is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom.

A Christian is a man in Christ. "If any man be in Christ." A Christian is a man for Christ. "Glorify God in your body and spirit which are God's."

Christian - One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

To be a Christian - a follower of Jesus Christ - is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom. (p172)

Christian, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ so long as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

The Church, which is not only the bishops, must be where there is pain. Christians must be like the blood that goes to the wound without being called. When the blood gushes from the wound, it is not that it wants to escape; it wants to close the wound with platelets. A Christian should be where there is a wound in the world, trying to heal that wound. One should be everywhere, but especially where there is a wound.

Pain undoubtedly frightens everyone. But when it is enlightened by faith it becomes a way to cut back selfishness, banalities and frivolities. What’s more, we Christians live pain in communion with the Crucified Jesus: clinging to Him, we fill our pain with love and transform it into a force that challenges and overcomes the selfishness that is still present in the world.

The cross is not random suffering, but necessary suffering. The cross is not suffering that stems from natural existence; it is the suffering that comes from being Christian. … A Christianity that no longer took discipleship seriously remade the gospel into only the solace of cheap grace. Moreover, it drew no line between natural and Christian existence. Such a Christianity had to understand the cross as one's daily misfortune, as the predicament and anxiety of our daily life. Here it has been forgotten that the cross also means being rejected, that the cross includes the shame of suffering. Being shunned, despised, and deserted by people, as in the psalmists unending lament, is an essential feature of the suffering of the cross, which cannot be comprehended by a Christianity that is unable to differentiate between a citizen's ordinary existence and a Christian existence. The cross is suffering with Christ.

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan, for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.