“Why doesn’t God just force us to do the things he knows to be right? It is because that would lose precisely that which he has intended in our creation: freely chosen character.”

We don’t believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.

You can live opposite of what you profess, but you cannot live opposite of what you believe.

Two ways of thinking: Human kingdom and human cleverness or God’s kingdom and God’s cleverness.

We’re not here to prove we’re right; we’re here to help people.

“Spirituality” wrongly understood or pursued is a major source of human misery and rebellion against God.

Spiritual formation in Christ moves us toward a total interchange of our ideas and images for his.

We have churches full of people who profess all kinds of stuff that they don’t believe. They think that by professing it they’re doing something good. Really, they’re just deluding themselves.

Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them.

When we pass through what we call death, we do not loose the world. Indeed, we see it for the first time as it really is.

Your mind will really talk to you when you begin to deny fulfillment to your desires, and you will find how subtle and shameless it is.

As Augustine say clearly, God being God offends human pride. If God is running the universe and has first claim on our lives, guess who isn’t running the universe and does not get to have things as they please.

It’s very difficult to be right about something without hurting someone with it.

Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It’s like education. Everyone gets an education; it’s just a matter of which one you get.

Find a person who has embraced anger, and you will find a person with a wounded ego.

We cannot handle injustice by finding more ways to impose what is in fact “right” on people. It has to come from the inside. And that’s where the church should be working.

The transformation of the social world is at its heart the transformation of personal relations. That’s the key to transforming society in the larger arena.

On the plains of hesitation lie the blackened bones of countless millions who at the dawn of victory lay down to rest, and in resting died.

You need good thinkers around you.

All I need is your touch to feel alive and to get drunk off your presence.

Plain as a nose in a man’s face.

What is food to one man may be fierce poison to others.

Men are eager to tread underfoot what they have once too much feared.

He who slings mud generally loses ground.

She’s pretty amazing.