“The purpose of Jesus’s coming is to put the whole world right, to renew and restore the creation, not to escape it.”

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?”

And what is so intricate, so entangling as death? Who ever got out of a winding sheet?

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.

There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place.

When I was a little kid, all I wanted to do was to escape what I thought was the country and get to a city. Probably film and television had influenced me so much, I really thought the key to happiness was living a very artificial life in a penthouse in New York with martini glasses.

Escape me? Never, beloved! While I am I, and you are you.

I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it.

The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it.

You can’t live in this world but there’s nowhere else to go.