"To love the Lord my God with all my soul will involve a spiritual cost. I'll have to give Him my heart, and let Him love through it whom and how He wills, even if this seems at times to break my heart.
To love the Lord my God with all my soul will involve a volitional and emotional cost. I'll have to give Him my will, my rights to decide and choose, and all my relationships, for Him to guide and control, even when I cannot understand His reasoning.
To love the Lord my God with all my mind will involve an intellectual cost. I must give Him my mind, my intelligence, my reasoning powers, and trust Him to work through them, even when He may appear to act in contradiction to common sense.
To love the Lord my God with all my strength will involve a physical cost. I must give Him my body to indwell, and through which to speak, whether He chooses by health or sickness, by strength or weakness, and trust Him utterly with the outcome" (27-28.)
"The side branches, thorns and knots must all be trimmed away with the whittling knife to perfect the arrow. Likewise God is working on my temperament; my sensibilities; my habits - "the sin which clings so closely" -for example, impatience, being hurt easily, unbelief, relying on my feelings; my pride of nationality, education, and apparent natural abilities; my self - self-pity, or self-reliance, or self-justification; my cowardice to face myself for what I really am - to see myself as others see me" (115-116).
"Today it would appear that we Christians prefer to talk of a measure of commitment, the length to which we are willing to become involved, rather than the depths of God's immeasurable love in which we long to become immersed. There is abroad an atmosphere of careful calculation, 'thus far and no further,' maintaining certain reasonable limits. The carefree abandonment of love that marks the sacrifices of Paul, of second-century Christians, of nineteenth-century missionaries, seems sadly lacking. Today we weigh up what we can afford to give Him: in those days, they knew that they could not afford to give Him less than all!" (124-125).