To take His yoke [Mt 11:29] means joining Him in His work, making our work His work. To trust Him is to understand that total immersion in what He is doing with our life is the best thing that could ever happen to us.
To "learn from Him" in this total-life immersion is how we "seek first His kingdom and His righteousness" (Matthew 6:33). The outcome is that we increasingly are able to do all things, speaking or acting, as if Christ were doing them (Colossians 3:17). As apprentices of Christ we are not learning how to do some special religious activity, but how to live every moment of our lives from the reality of God's kingdom. I am learning how to live my actual life as Jesus would if He were me. (11-12)

Grace, we must learn, is opposed to earning, not to effort. (12)

We need to admit the mind into christian fellowship again. We need the mind disciplined in christ, enlightened by faith, passionate for God and His creation, to be let loose in the world. (16)

Our society has replaced heroes with celebrities, the quest for a well-informed character with the search for a flat stomach, substance and depth with image and personality. (21)

In the rest of this chapter, I will demonstrate what a major cause of our current cultural crisis consists of a worldview shift from a Judeo-christian understanding of reality to a post-Christian one. Moreover, this shift itself expresses a growing anti-intellectualism in the church resulting in the marginalization of christianity in society - its lack of saltiness, if you will - and the emergences of the most secular cutlure the world has ever seen (21).

As Puritan Cotton Mather proclaimed, "Ignorance is the Mother not of Devotion but of HERESY." (22)

Much good came from these movements [Whitefield, First, Second Awakening, Finney,Layman's Prayer Revival]. But their overall effect was to overemphasize immediate personal conversion to Christ instead of a studied period of reflection and conviction; emotional, simple, popular preaching instead of intellectually careful and doctrinally precise sermons; and personal feelings and relationship to christ instead of a deep grasp of the nature of Christian teaching and ideas. Sadly, as historian George Marsden notes, "anti-intellectualism was a feature of American revivalism." (23)

Additionally, fewer and fewer people regarded the bible as ta body of divinely revelaed, true propositions about various topics that requires a devoted intellect to grasp and study systematically. Instead, the Bible increasingly was sought solely as a practical guide for ethical guidance and spiritual growth. (24)

If our lives and ministries are expressions of what we actually believe, and if what we believe is off center and yet so pervasive that it is seldom even brought to conscious discussion, much less debated, then this explains why our impact on the world is so paltry compared to our numbers. (25)

... faith is now understood as a blind act of will, a decision of believe something that is either independent of reason or that is a simple choice to believe while ignoring the paltry lack of evidence for what is believed. By contrast with this modern misunderstanding, biblically, faith is a power or skill ot act in accordance with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in what we have reason to believe is true... We should have good reasons for thinking that Christianity is true before we dedicate ourselves completely to it. (25)

There has emerged a secular/sacred separation in our understanding of the Christian life with the result that Christian teaching and practice are privatized and placed in a separate compartment from the public or so-called secular activities of life. (27)

As theologian Carl Henry put it, "Training the mind is an essential responsibility of the home, the church, and the school. Unless evangelicals prod young people to disciplined thinking, they waste - even undermine one of christianity's most prescious resources." (28)

For some time, theological liberals have understood that whoever controls the thinking leadership of the church in a culture will eventually control the churhc itself. (29)

Religion is now viewed by many as a placebo or emotional crutch preicisely because that is how we often pitch the gospel to unbelievers. (30)

... the church's extinction will not come by sword or pillory, but by the quiet death of irrelevance (33)

Science is the measure of all thing, and when a scientist speaks about something, he or she speaks ex cathedra. (33)

Because only science supposedly deals with facts, truth, and reazso, but religion and ethics allegedly deal with private, subjective opinions. (33)

As G.K. Chesterton once bemoaned, once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything. (34)

Happiness (Greek: eudaimonia) was understood as a life of virtue, and the successful person was on who knew how to live a life well according to what we are by nature dut to the creative design of God... So understood, happiness involves suffering, endurance, and patience because these are important menas to becoming a good person who lives the good life. (35)

Freedom was traditionally understood as the power to do what one ought to do. (35)

Traditionally, tolerance of other viewpoints meant that even though I think those viewpoints are dead wrong and will argue against them fervently, nevertheless, I will defend your right to argue your own case. (35)

According to the modern view, the good life is the satisfaction of any pleasure or desire that someone freely and autonomously chooses for himself or herself... Freedom is the right to do what I want, not thepower to do what I by nature ought to.... If I am free to create my own moral universe and version of the good life, and there is no right or wrong answer to what I should create, then morality - indeed, everyhting - ultimately exists to make me happy. (37)