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

The ministry of bearing with one another is learning to hear God speak through difficult people.

Our beliefs are not just estimates of probabilities. They are also the instruments that guide our actions.

Both hope and pessimism are deeply contagious. And no one is more infectious than a leader.

We who preach have one tool. We are people of the book.

The problem with spending your life climbing up the ladder is that you will go right past Jesus, for he’s coming down.

What matters is not the accomplishments you achieve; what matters is the person you become.

Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes.

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.

It is sheer folly to take unwilling hounds to the chase.

I am not the same person as I started, but then again that was always the point of it.

When we live in the love of God, we begin to pay attention to people the way God pays attention to us.

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal

I have taken a wife, I have sold my sovereignty for a dowry.

Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.

Lucretius, who follows [Epicurus] in denouncing love, sees no harm in sexual intercourse provided it is divorced from passion.

The evil that we know is best.