Wisdom gleaned while studying for my midterm exam.

If it's not obvious, I love quotations.

“Insofar as the church is conformed to the world, and the two communities appear to the onlooker to be merely two versions of the same thing, the church is contradicting its true identity… God’s historical purpose is to call out a people for Himself; that this people is a ‘holy’ people, set apart from the world to belong to Him and to obey Him.” --John Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, p. 17

“Men are in their nature ‘evil.’ It is out of their heart that evil things come and out of their heart that their mouth speaks, just as it is the tree which determines its fruit. So there is but one solution: ‘Make the tree good, and its fruit good.’ A new birth is essential. Only a belief in the necessity and possibility of a new birth can keep us from reading the Sermon on the Mount with either foolish optimism or hopeless despair.” --John Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, p. 29