Faith is as precious to die by as it is to live by.

There is a kind of listening with half an ear that presumes already to know what the other person has to say. It is an impatient, inattentive listening, that despises the brother and is only...

To be a man, a boy must see a man.

Let not him who accepts light in an instant despise him who gropes months in shadows.

You’d think God would come right out and tell us what to do in the Bible, but He doesn’t. He mostly tells stories, and He rarely stops the story to say what the point is....

The web of trust is built at eye level, peer to peer.

Word-centered people who enter counseling will be more likely follow the guidance set out in Scripture. Because they know more of the depth of their sin, they are more willing to allow other church members...

The more spiritual successes that Edwards experienced, the more he seemed to intentionally infuse his sermons with language deemed to move a person’s emotional center—their souls—to spiritually and physically respond.

Young children especially need the visual reinforcement of seeing you turn to Scripture for wisdom.

The essence of a mature human being in religious terms is the ability to see, to be aware of others’ suffering and to be touched by it.

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.

Despite the huge crowd, He speaks to His disciples as though no one else is there.

I cannot read God’s mind, however I can read God’s Word.

The author sees Joseph of Genesis as a type of Christ’s Pentecostal power. He who was thought dead has been raised in power, and the power is evident in the chariot he sends for his...

The only way your child will grow out of their dependency into self-sufficient adults is for you to essentially abandon your own independence for 20 years or so.

God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real.

What makes authentic disciples is not visions, ecstasies, biblical mastery of chapter and verse, or spectacular success in the ministry, but a capacity for faithfulness. Buffeted by the fickle winds of failure, battered by their...

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult...

The God of the universe–the creator of nitrogen and pine needles, galaxies and E-minor–loves us with a radical, unconditional, self-sacrificing love. And what is our typical response? We go to church, sing songs, and try...

Part of the genius of (Nick) Sabin’s system was that he understood that no matter the skill set, he was inheriting vulnerable kids from various backgrounds. For those times when they made poor decisions, as...

The moral crisis she’d just gone through made her feel indulgent toward the faults, the delinquencies of others. How thoroughly a human being can be buffeted and over-mastered by fate had been borne in upon...

When religion becomes so involved in a future good “over yonder” that it forgets the present evils over here it is as dry as dust religion and needs to be condemned.

Just open your eyes! I thought. These desperate poor are your gurus.

God’s word tells us that righteousness is a gift; it cannot be earned. But godliness is not a gift. We must pay a price to touch godliness through a daily decision to die to self...

Everybody wants a miracle; we just don’t want to be in a situation where we need one. You can’t have one without the other. Sometimes what we perceive as our problem is really God setting...

Throughout history the cross stands as a symbol of protest and revolt; protest against all claims, whether by religious or political power, to absolute unquestioning control over human minds and bodies; revolt against all systems...

If we know our original blessing, we can easily handle our original sin. If we rest in a previous dignity, we can bear insults effortlessly. If you really know your name is on some eternal...

Be ruthless in one important area: Yourself. Be ruthless about your commitment to Christ. Be ruthless about your intellectual growth. Be ruthless about finishing well. One of the biggest areas we should be ruthless about...

Humankind cannot bear too much reality.

As your father keeps clean his lamp to have good light, so keep clean your spirit.

The only humility that is really ours is not that which we try to show before God in prayer, but that which we carry with us, and carry out, in our ordinary conduct; the insignficances...

The soul is “torn apart in a painful condition as long as it prefers the eternal because of its Truth but does not discard the temporal because of familiarity.

The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own.

When God interrupts your life, He is calling you to follow Him in a new way. By breaking into your settled pattern, He is moving you to a new place where you can make fresh...

The choice we face is not, as many imagine, between heaven and hell. Rather, the choice is between heaven and this world. Even a fool would exchange hell for heaven; but only the wise will...

Paul was terribly personal. The books I like are the ones that make you feel like you are with a person who is being quite vulnerable, telling you all sorts of stuff that is personal,...

If you knew how the journey was going to end, you could afford to be patient along the path.

If all you are doing is spending time with the struggling members of your church and you are not building proactively into your church’s culture, and you are being shortsighted and limiting the effectiveness of...

It never cost a disciple anything to follow Jesus; to talk about cost when you are in love with anyone is an insult.

[Mary] says her memories Will help those of usNewly come to our Lord’s mercy,To live in His light.

Love, its power and authority, always gets there first, comes to believe first, and always waits for the others, especially the leaders, to catch up! This is the reality of what happened among the disciples...

Yanked out of the present, Adam discovered the richness of the past in people’s stories.

Treat this crisis as practice for the next crisis.

Being that ‘reason is not antithetical to faith’ (Woods) and that Pentecost established the Reality of super-nature (Lewis) and that ‘theology matters’ (Wimber), then ’empowered evangelicalism’ (Nathan) is the natural expression of discipleship.”~R. Alan Woods...

Because I am not yet living up to what Jesus expects me to be in those red letters in the Bible, I always define myself as somebody who is saved by God’s grace and is...

Bono has commented often that U2 did everything the wrong way around. Other bands started singing about girls and then found the issues in the cosmos and started singing about God; U2 started singing about...

Older people make this mistake all the time with younger people, treating them as a finished product when in fact they are in process.

Maybe you have been looking for peace for no one but yourself.

There is nothing Christ dislikes more than for His people to make a showpiece of Him and not to use Him.