“As Augustine say clearly, God being God offends human pride. If God is running the universe and has first claim on our lives, guess who isn’t running the universe and does not get to have things as they please.”

Suppose we have a motor and our transmission doesn’t work or our clutch or whatever. Then our body, our motor, just takes us down the road. Or our brakes don’t work! We must have a coordination system.

Jesus is actually looking for people he can trust with his power.

When we receive God’s gift of life by relying on Christ, we find that God comes to act with us as we rely on him in our actions.

Knowing the ‘right answers’ does not mean we believe them. To believe them means to act as though they’re true.

Business is a primary arrangement on God’s part for people to love one another and serve one another.

Sometimes we get caught up in trying to glorify God by praising what He can do and we lose sight of the practical point of what He actually does do.

You cannot trust Jesus in areas in which you don’t think him competent.

There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.

The sinner is not the one who uses a lot of grace. The saint burns grace like a 747 burns fuel on take off.

Discipline, strictly speaking, is activity carried on to prepare us indirectly for some activity other than itself. We do not practice the piano to practice the piano well, but to play it well.

Keep eternity before the children.

Fasting confirms our utter dependence upon God by finding in Him a source of sustenance beyond food.

Spiritual transformation into Christ-likeness in not going to happen unless we act. What transforms us is the will to obey Jesus Christ.

The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.

To allow lust (or strong desires) to govern our life is to exalt our will over God’s.

Bodily pleasure is not in itself a bad thing. But when it is exalted to a necessity and we become dependent upon it, then we are slaves of our body and its feelings. Only misery lies ahead.

Art has an obligation to offend.

I revise the manuscript till I can’t read it any longer, then I get somebody to type it. Then I revise the typing. Then it’s retyped again. Then there’s a third typing, which is the final one. Nothing should then remain that offends the eye.

Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women’s magazines.

It’s a fact that it is much more comfortable to be in the position of the person who has been offended than to be the unfortunate cause of it.

Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.

If you take the the insults of your fellow human beings personally, you will be offended for the rest of your life.

You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.

Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.