Don't create theology about God so that you can feel better about Him.
Jesus doesn't need you to make him palatable...he needs you to be faithful.
I'm accepted by God and it has nothing to do with me.
If you're a beast in the pulpit but a coward in your neighborhood, something has gone wrong.
Every one of us loves Pauline theology, but few of us want Pauline pain.
The depth, width, ferocity, and immensity of God is seen most spectacularly in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
When we see the bankruptcy, slavery, and vanity of everything else, we can finally say, ‘To die is gain.’
Many of the things that stifle growth are morally neutral. They're not bad things. Facebook is not bad. Television and movies are not bad. I enjoy TV, but it doesn't take long for me to begin to find humorous on TV what the Lord finds heartbreaking.
God doesn't need to have emergency meetings. He's never gathered the Trinity and asked 'What happened there'.
The great mercy of God was that while I was purposefully preparing God's people, He was purposefully preparing me.
The great message that we call the gospel begins, then, not with us, or our need, or even the meeting of that need, but with the writer of the news and the sender of its heralds: God himself.
He created the flavors! He created the colors. He created it all, and he did it all out of the overflow of his perfections. It’s not like he was thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got some fajita flavoring over here. I know: let’s put it on the cow and the chicken.’ He created the avocado to have a certain flavor; he created the skirt steak, the fillet, and the tenderloin to have certain flavors. That was God’s doing. So every aspect of creation, from the largest galaxy to the tiniest burst of flavor in food or drink or seasoning, radiates the goodness of God.
I'm wise to be a good steward, but I'll never be my own rescuer. The worth thing you can do with fear and anxiety is to pretend you're too strong to have them. The best thing you can do is just to let Him be in charge of them
Church is missing transcendence. My generation was raised on a religion of moral control. Do this. Don't do that. And a lot of self-help religion. Feel better. Get out of debt. Six ways to overcome your fears. Seven ways not to lust. Ultimately that message didn't work. It was empty. There was no transcendence. The omniscient, omnipresent, all-powerful God of the universe wasn't the focus.
We’ve been given the covenant community because we need each other, and together we’ll be more mature, experience more life, and know more joy than we ever would apart from one another.
God's response to the belittlement of his name, from the beginning of time, has been the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on a Roman cross.
When we join God in his plan for his global glory, we get to be a part of the cosmic take-your-kid-t o-work day.
In essence, we are reconciled to reconcile.
The glory of God is that you can't outs in His grace.
All ministry that is faithful & eventually fruitful finds its roots in the life, death, & resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The cross of Christ is the response of God to men for belittling His name.
Intellectual ascent to correct doctrine is not salvation
I was used to being the smartest guy in the room, and then God dropped me in a place that was well beyond me. It was painfully awesome.
The Imperfect Pastor by Zack Eswine might be the most helpful and profound book I've read in years. If you're in pastoral ministry grab a copy.
We are supernaturalists first, not naturalists. The only reason we feel compelled to accommodate science is that science says we ought to. But it is science that should accommodate revelation. Revelation has been around much longer.
