Success is simple. Do what's right, the right way, at the right time.
If the focus of our testimony is our changed life, we as well as our hearers are bound to be disappointed.
If moral truths do not exist as a foundation for law, then law itself becomes merely a system of raw political power accountable to no one.
Good teaching gains its authority from having consistent and repeated support from multiple scriptural sources, and it builds a firm base for our unity and our confidence in Christ.
It is a grim job, this business of looking out over humanity.
Any profession of faith…entrusts the mind and heart to a truth that cannot be proven but can be lived.
The nature of pure and genuine religion…consists in faith, united with a serious fear of God, comprehending a voluntary reverence, and producing legitimate worship agreeable to the injunctions of the law.
Who needs a Dr. when you have WebMD? Who needs a counselor when you have the Holy Spirit? And who needs Wal-Mart when you have Amazon.com? :)
When the crucified Jesus is called "the image of the invisible God," the meaning is that THIS is God, and God is like THIS.
There is something gratuitous about creation, an unnecessary abundance of beauty, and through its blossoms and pleasures we can revel in the sheer largesse of the Father.
...childlike wonder and awe have died. The scenery and poetry and music of the majesty of God have dried up like a forgotten peach at the back of the refrigerator.
The Christian experience is not primarily formed by our liturgy, doctrine, or ecclesiology, as important as those might be. We are formed by the dangerous stories of our great hero.
Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.
It can be unhelpful to wax eloquent about the inerrancy of Scripture without an accompanying acknowledgment that, while Scripture may be inerrant, there are no inerrant interpreters of Scripture.
It is one thing to understand the gospel but is quite another to experience the gospel in such a way that it fundamentally changes us and becomes the source of our identity and security.
My identity and my security are not in my spiritual progress. My identity and my security are in God’s acceptance of me given as a gift in Christ.
We are changed not by being told what we need to do for God, but by hearing the news about what God has done for us.
To be evil at all, Satan needs good things he can abuse, things like intelligence, power and will. Those good things come from God.
People are not being reached in the context of the body of Christ--they're like newborn babies being left on a doorstep somewhere to feed and care for themselves.
Leadership doesn't occur in a vacuum, it manifests in a context. These contexts are as dynamic as the personalities, stakes, culture and information available.
I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.
