“How do you change your behavior? Change what you worship”

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

To discover the real you, look at what you spend time thinking about when no one is looking.

Religion: ‘My identity is built on being a good person.’ Gospel: ‘My identity is not built on my record or my performance but on Christ’s.’

Many times people think if God has called you to something, he’s promising you success. He might be calling you to fail to prepare you for something else through the failure.

We have to be careful not to elevate our preferences to moral standards and judge others by them. We only do so to feel superior.

If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning of life, and identity then it is an idol.

We are regularly in danger of having too light a view of our sin and also too light a grasp of what Jesus has done to free us from our sin.

Jesus Christ did not suffer so that you would not suffer. He suffered so that when you suffer, you’ll become more like him.

Religion operates on the principle ‘I obey-therefore I am accepted by God.’ But the operating principle of the gospel is ‘I am accepted by God through what Christ has done-therefore I obey.’

Worry is not believing God will get it right, and bitterness is believing God got it wrong.

To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.

The basic premise of religion– that if you live a good life, things will go well for you– is wrong. Jesus was the most morally upright person who ever lived, yet He had a life filled with the experience of poverty, rejection, injustice, and even torture.

As long as we think we are not that bad, the idea of grace will never change us.

Tolerance isn’t about not having beliefs. It’s about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.

Trust is accepting what God sends into your life whether you understand it or not.

When I forget the gospel I become dependent on the smiles and evaluation of others.

Human beings are the only creatures on earth that claim a God and the only thing that behaves like it hasn’t got one.

The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early ’60s, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behavior and dress.

Motivation is an inner force that compels behavior. Your inner drives will propel you further and faster than external perks.

My mom took all of my behavior personally. Everything I did she thought it was an act of rebellion against her. But it was just me being me.

We are witnessing a seismic change in consumer behavior. That change is being brought about by technology and the access people have to information.

I don’t want to be my extrovert self all the time.

I don’t think individual media outlets will regulate. There are such things as self-regulatory organizations that will look at the members of the industry and their behavior and establish standards of behavior.

You never really know what’s going to happen. You never know what the audience is going to be like or how they’re going to behave.