“Jesus is mysterious not just because of what we don’t know about him, but because of what we do know about him.”

Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.

Every human being who has ever lived has suffered from a messiah complex-except one.

Prayer allows us to wait without worry.

Skepticism can keep us from blessing, can keep us trapped in two minds.

Passion for our work is not usually a subterranean volcano waiting to erupt. It is a muscle that gets strengthened a little each day as we show up – as we do what is expected of us, and then some.

Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.

Grace is the offer of God’s ceaseless presence and irrational love that cannot be stopped.

When I teach the formal curriculum, I have the chance to think about it ahead of time. I can rehearse it. I can illustrate it with self-deprecating humor and humble-sounding personal disclosure. I can try to make it comes out just right.

Peace doesn’t come from finding a lake with no storms. It comes from having Jesus in the boat.

If you want to do the work of God, pay attention to people. Notice them. Especially the people nobody else notices.

Biblically, waiting is not just something we have to do until we get what we want. Waiting is part of the process of becoming what God wants us to be.

Solitude is the one place where we can gain freedom from the forces of society that will otherwise relentlessly mold us. Solitude requires relentless perseverance.

The goal is not for us to get through the Scriptures. The goal is to get the Scriptures through us.

The test of love is that it gives even when there is no expectation of a return.

The Holy Spirit will lead you to be with people as Jesus would be with them if He were in your place.

Willpower is trying very hard not to do something you want to do very much.

Nobody can guarantee the real terms per pupil funding increase. In the Labour party’s manifesto we know the figures don’t add up.

Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.

Perhaps our own opposition to even the level of European integration we have now, let alone any more, is well known.

We all know the stories about the Human Rights Act. About the illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because, and I am not making this up, he had a pet cat.

I lived in countries that had no democracy. so I don’t find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don’t know what it is not to have freedom.

I know there are some voices calling for a punitive deal that punishes Britain. That would be an act of calamitous self-harm for the countries of Europe, and it would not be the act of a friend.

There is a knowing in her, she hears them say, that makes her untamable. She has known since she was a child that she is observant in a way that makes them uncomfortable.

I know how to handle noise better than I can handle silence.