“You can’t live the Christian life without a band of Christian friends, without a family of believers in which you find a place.”

How you experience your present is completely shaped by what you believe your ultimate future to be.

Where you find your significance is where you find your salvation.

God’s grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit their failure to perform and who acknowledge their need for a Savior.

The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe.

…Singles, too, must see the penultimate status of marriage. If single Christians don’t develop a deeply fulfilling love relationship with Jesus, they will put too much pressure on their DREAM of marriage, and that will create pathology in their lives as well.

No, he was in agony, and he looked down at us – denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him – and in the greatest act of love in history, he STAYED. He said, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.” He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.

In the original language, ‘Fear the Lord’ doesn’t mean be afraid. It means sustaining a joyful, astonished awe, and wonder before Him.

Are you living to justify yourself, or are you living because you are justified?

You are more sinful than you could dare imagine and you are more loved and accepted than you could ever dare hope.

Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they are guilty of it.

Everyone says they want community and friendship. But mention accountability or commitment to people, and they run the other way.

The way to find your calling is to look at the way you were created. Your gifts have not emerged by accident.

The gospel humbles us into the dust and at the very same time exalts us to the heavens.

Prayer is the way to experience a powerful confidence that God is handling our lives well, that our bad things will turn out for good, our good things cannot be taken from us, and the best things are yet to come.

If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.

The key question in order to change you is not ‘What would Jesus do?’ but “What has Jesus done for you?”

I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.

There is nothing in art, in philosophy, or in politics to match the fervor of mutual cooperation among discordant bands of fanatics.

But the live band is now becoming ancient history in Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma.

And there are places on the border, such as the Arizona desert or the open terrain around the Big Bend in South Texas, where Mother Nature has created her own barrier that is not easily passable. Or if you do pass through it, you are easily detected.

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

Buy our album, were Nirvana, a garage band from Seattle. Well, it sure beats raising cattle.

One of my pet peeves is that sometimes the talents of my band get overlooked because, and it was the same problem that Frank Zappa had, with a lot of groups that use humor, people don’t realize there’s a lot of craft behind the comedy.

I’ve been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.