To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot liked being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything.

So there are two ways, not one, to be your own Savior and Lord: you can break all the moral rules and chart your own course, or you can try keeping all the external moral rules and seek to earn heaven’s favor. Both are strategies for avoiding God. Apart from Jesus Christ, every person is “dedicated to a project of self-salvation, to using God and others in order to get power and control for themselves. We are just going about it in different ways.

If you have a God that never crosses your will and ‘feelings,’ you don’t have a God; you are your own god. You have a figment of your own imagination.

If Jesus was truly, really raised from the dead--and he was--then eventually everything is going to be all right.