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of Jesus’ death and resurrection, all of God’s sovereignty is mediated exclusively through King Jesus. . . . Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” ([I Cor.] 15:25). That presupposes the reign is still contested, and still advances. This is of a piece with Jesus’ claim, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt 16:18). But one day, the final enemy, death itself, will die, and Jesus’ mediatorial kingship will end. God will be all in all.

— D. A. Carson

Jesus died for disciples who do a poor job of witnessing. He died for those of us who have all too often failed to commend him because we feared it might get awkward. But he also died to give us the grace to press through the awkwardness to testify to him.

— Ken Currie

God forbid that I should travel with anybody a quarter of an hour without speaking of Christ to them.

— George Whitefield

The book of Acts is especially important because in it we can actually see the scope and nature of the earliest Christian mission. If you are looking for a picture of the early church giving itself to creation care, plans for societal renewal, and strategies to serve the community in Jesus’ name, you won't find them in Acts. But if you are looking for preaching, teaching, and the centrality of the Word, this is your book. The story of Acts is the story of the earliest Christians’ efforts to carry out the commission given them in Acts 1:8.

— Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert

Worship is the fuel and goal of missions. Missions exits because worship does not. . . . Passion for God in worship precedes the offer of God in preaching. You can’t commend what you don’t cherish. Missionaries will never call out, “Let the nations be glad!” who cannot say from the heart, “I rejoice in the Lord. . . . I will be glad and exult in thee, I will sing praise to thy name, O Most High” (Ps 104:34, 9:2). Missions begins and ends in worship.

— John Piper

Screwtape, the “professor demon,” is training a young demon, his nephew, on how to keep Christians from loving one another:

“Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches. The reasons are obvious. [The Church], being a unity of place and not of likings, brings people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy desires. . . . The search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil.”

— from The Screwtape Letter (C.S. Lewis)