About Politics: “Christianity has not and does not profess to have, a detailed political program. We are given the golden rule, ‘Do as you would be done by.’ But how that should be applied…to a particular society at a particular time is not specified for us. “That is why people who are fighting for quite opposite things can both say they are fighting for Christianity.”

“Most of us aren’t really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says: we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party.”

“A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian…He who converts his neighbor has performed the most practical Christian political act of all.”

The real Savior of America is not a political party or leader. It’s Jesus Christ. And his work of transformation begins not with the enactment of laws, or the election of our preferred candidates. His work of transformation begins on the inside of the human heart.

About Morality:
1. The principles of right and wrong are for our benefit. “The moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine…Every moral failure is going to cause trouble, probably to others and certainly to yourself.”
2. No man is an island. Morality has three dimensions: Inward, outward and upward. Our choices can’t be separated from our horizontal relationships with others and our vertical relationship with God.
3. The individual must be the first to change. “A community that has lost its conscience will never be able to hire enough cops.” (Chuck Colson)
4. The individual has more value than a civilization. “If Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment.”
5. Virtue is more than outward compliance with the Rules of Morality. Outward compliance with the rules is not the endgame. A true virtue is not simply an outward act. A true virtue is the quality of a person’s character that becomes evident in what they do.
6. Each choice we make changes us a little bit on the inside. Virtue is more than outward compliance with the rules, but the habits of outward compliance can create change on the inside.
7. The starting point for this character transformation is different for each of us. “Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends…We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.”
8. Awareness of evil increases in those becoming better and decreases in those becoming worse. “When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less.”
9. This life counts forever. Our capacity to enjoy the future in the kingdom of God is to some extent dependent on how we use our opportunities now, in this life. The vector of our character and life choices now…will extended beyond this world into eternity.