“Legalistic remorse says, “I broke God’s rules,” while real repentance says, “I broke God’s heart.””

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?”

Suffering is unbearable if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you.

You are a totally loved moral failure.

God looks at the anxious and says, I tore my Son to shreds for you, and you’re afraid I will not give you what you need?

They didn’t have to be a hoodlum, they didn’t have to be a gangster. They could stand up from a broken home, on welfare, and they could run for president of the United States.

I was age six or seven, and singing, “Jesus wants me for her son, beep, to shine for him,” and people smiled and pinched my cheeks till the blood vessels broke, and I knew I was doing something right.

I broke down all conclusions into illusions and confusions.

There will come a day when you will be stronger and you will forget that person that just broke your heart.

Without them, you will go broke.

My mom then got Pell Grants, put herself through college to get a degree to get a better job. Because we were broke, I then had to go to a state school.

There were many reasons we broke up. There was a religious difference: I’m a Catholic, and she’s the devil.

I’m one-hundred-fifty miles off Cape Horn, both autopilots are broken, and my boat is drifting toward one of the nastiest chunks of ocean on the face of the earth.