“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.”

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.

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.

I never sleep comfortably except when I am at sermon or when I pray to God.

Slotted into broad diagnostic pigeonholes and provided generalized treatments that may not always meet their specific needs.

Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.

A graceful and honorable old age is the childhood of immortality.

The fool too late, his substance eaten up, reckons the cost.

Good things soon find a purchaser.

When you’re all burned up, then you become light.

Nixon is finding out there are no tails on an Eisenhower jacket.