“When a man or woman is truly honest, it is virtually impossible to insult them personally.”

The gospel will persuade no one unless it has so convicted us that we are transformed by it.

Be daring enough to be different, humble enough to make mistakes, wild enough to be burnt in the fire of love, real enough to make others see how phony you are.

The dominant characteristic of an authentic spiritual life is the gratitude that flows from trust — not only for all the gifts that I receive from God, but gratitude for all the suffering. Because in that purifying experience, suffering has often been the shortest path to intimacy with God.

What makes the Kingdom come is heartfelt compassion: a way of tenderness that knows no frontiers, no labels, no compartmentalizing, and no sectarian divisions.

Our huffing and puffing to impress God, our scrambling for brownie points, our thrashing about trying to fix ourselves while hiding our pettiness and wallowing in guilt are nauseating to God and are a flat denial of the gospel of grace.

Jesus comes not for the super-spiritual but for the wobbly and the weak-kneed who know they don’t have it all together, and who are not too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace.

The Good News means we can stop lying to ourselves. The sweet sound of amazing grace saves us from the necessity of self-deception. It keeps us from denying that though Christ was victorious, the battle with lust, greed, and pride still rages within us.

In every encounter we either give life or we drain it; there is no neutral exchange.

Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become.

Suffering, failure, loneliness, sorrow, discouragement, and death will be part of your journey, but the Kingdom of God will conquer all these horrors. No evil can resist grace forever.

Whatever we have done in the past, be it good or evil, great or small, is irrelevant to our stance before God today. It is only NOW that we are in the presence of God.

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.

If in our hearts we really don’t believe that God loves us as we are, if we are still tainted by the lie that we can do something to make God love us more, we are rejecting the message of the cross.

Childlike surrender and trust, I believe, is the defining spirit of authentic discipleship.

Genuine self-acceptance is not derived from the power of positive thinking, mind games or pop psychology. IT IS AN ACT OF FAITH in the God of grace.

How glorious the splendor of a human heart that trusts that it is loved!

I honestly believe going independent is the future. Social is changing, Spotify is changing, everything is changing.

Honestly, it’s hard to deal with the haters, but something that has helped me is not to focus on the haters and to focus on the nice people!

I’ve always been able to get inside a song really easily, and if it’s my song, I can make it seem honest.

I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all i knew); Theirs names are What and Why and When And How And Where and Who.

I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming from inside. There’s no tricks. It’s honesty with big melodies.

Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it, a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not.

Festive alcohol sometimes leads to an excess of honesty.

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.