"Our Lord’s first requirement is a personal relationship to Him and then obedience to His principles. Tolstoy blundered in applying the Sermon on the Mount practically without insisting on the need to be born again of the Spirit first, and he had an enormous following of intellectual faddists, mere spring-cleaners. It is not a question of applying Jesus Christ’s principles to your actual life first of all, but of applying them to your relationship to Him; then as you keep your soul open in relation to Him your conscience will decide how you are to act out of that relationship."- Biblical ethics Oswald chambers