In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner. The psychiatrist must first search my heart and yet he never plumbs its ultimate depth. The Christian brother knows when I come to him: here is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants to confess and yearns for God's forgiveness. The psychiatrist views me as if there were no God. The brother views me as I am before the judging and merciful God in the Cross of Jesus Christ. It is not the lack of psychological knowledge but lack of love for the crucified Jesus Christ that makes us so poor and inefficient in brotherly confession.

I am convinced that many men who preach the gospel and love the Lord are really misunderstood. People make a "profession," but because they haven't understood the message, they are not really saved. They feel a psychological need and they want psychological relief, but they don't understand that the Christian message is not talking only about psychological relief (though it includes that) but is talking about true moral guilt in the presence of a holy God who exists. The real need is salvation from true moral guilt, not just relief from guilt feelings. And I am certain many men who make a profession go away still unsaved, having not heard one word of the real gospel because they have filtered the message through their own thought forms and their own intellectual framework in which the word "guilt" equals "guilt feelings." Death in the City (Downers Grove, InterVarsity Press: 1969) 93

Everybody thinks of changing humanity, but nobody thinks of changing himself.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.

Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility.

Men in our own sociologically and psychologically oriented age have all kinds of explanations for the moral problems of man. But according to the Bible, it is not moral declension that causes doctrinal declension; it is just the opposite. Turning away from the truth -- that which is cognitive, that which may be known about God -- produces moral declension. Death in the City (Downers Grove, InterVarsity Press: 1969) 103