“Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it.”

When Job was prospering, he prayed. When he was suffering, he still prayed.

Religion says earn your life. Secular society says create your life. Jesus says, ‘My life for your life.

If you love anything in this world more than God, you will crush that object under the weight of your expectations.

The reason the stone was rolled away on Jesus’s tomb was not so that Jesus could get out, but so that we could get in.

Christians tend to motivate others with guilt. We tend to say: You would do this if you were really committed Christians, indicating that we are committed and all that is needed is for others to become as good as we are!

The Bible’s purpose is not so much to show you how to live a good life.

Our character is mainly shaped by our primary social community – the people with whom we eat, play, converse, and study.

There is no way to have a real relationship without becoming vulnerable to hurt. Christmas tells us that God became breakable and fragile.

How do you change your behavior? Change what you worship

The gospel is not only the way to enter the kingdom; it is the way to live in the kingdom.

The Christian Gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me.

There is a joy available that the deepest grief cannot put out. No circumstance or person can take away the joy God gives.

The sin that is most destructive in your life right now is the one you are most defensive about.

Christians need the gospel as much as non-Christians do.

We instinctively tend to limit for whom we exert ourselves. We do it for people like us, and for people whom we like. Jesus will have none of that.

The great basis of Christian assurance is not how much our hearts are set on God, but how unshakably his heart is set on us.

The U.S. affirms freedom of speech.[Vladimir] Putin is no friend of freedom of speech.

My purpose here is to affirm that the unitive state is a hidden path in itself, a movement in its own right that ultimately leads to no-self (no true-self and no-union). In short, the unitive state is the hidden path to no-self.

I love black because it affirms, designs and styles. A woman in a black dress is a pencil stroke.

It is saying less than the truth to affirm that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well-chosen and well-tended fruit tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals.

We affirm that the true story of capitalism is now beginning, because capitalism is not a system of oppression only, but is also a selection of values, a coordination of hierarchies, a more amply developed sense of individual responsibility.

Christianity affirms the value of each individual soul. Nazism denies it.

But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understand, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses.

Rarely affirm, seldom deny, always distinguish.