“God sees us as we are, loves us as we are, and accepts us as we are. But by His grace, He does not leave us as we are.”

Only on the cross do you have a totally holy God and a totally loving God.

Forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness. To not retaliate is to absorb the cost.

So we find messages of self-salvation extremely attractive, whether they are religious (Keep these rules and you earn eternal blessing) or secular (Grab hold of these things and you’ll experience blessing now).

Prayer should be done regularly, persistently, resolutely, and tenaciously at least daily, whether we feel like it or not.

Money isn’t an idol. It just shows you where your idols are.

You dont fall into love. You commit to it. Love is saying I will be there no matter what.

Faith is living out and believing what truth is despite what you feel.

It is impossible to forgive someone if you feel superior to him or her.

Faith is not primarily a function of how you feel.

Love is the effort and desire to make someone else everything they were created to be.

When love of one’s people becomes an absolute, it turns into racism. When love of equality turns into a supreme thing, it can result in hatred and violence toward anyone who has led a privileged life. It is the settled tendency of human societies to turn good political causes into counterfeit gods.

Men, you’ll never be a good groom to your wife unless you’re first a good bride to Jesus.

The resurrection was God’s way of stamping PAID IN FULL right across history so that nobody could miss it.

If you want God’s grace, all you need is need, all you need is nothing. But that kind of spiritual humility is hard to muster.

If I have the smile of God, all other frowns are inconsequential.

Religion is ‘if you obey, then you will be accepted’. But the Gospel is, ‘if you are absolutely accepted, and sure you’re accepted, only then will you ever begin to obey’. Those are two utterly different things. Every page of the Bible shows the difference.

The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide; he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest.

He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

It doesn’t prove anything except that you’re bullying us. Which, as I recall, is a sign of cowardice.

You possess other people’s…Bodies.”he accepted that statement with a nod.”do you want to possess my body?i want to do a lot of things to your body, but that’s not one of them.

The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.

I think that’s what happened to the record business when ‘Napster’ came around. The industry rejected what was happening instead of accepting it as change.

Fascism accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with the state’s.

I always hate it when I see the wrong person in massive roles, so for me, my biggest fear would be accepting a role I thought I wouldn’t find the rhythm of.