“We know we can’t be spiritually transformed by just focusing on the will.”

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.

The will is transformed by experience, not information.

The open secret of many Bible believing Churches is that a vanishingly small percentage of those talking about prayer and Bible reading are actually doing what they are talking about.

Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.

This life is not something that is imposed upon us; we receive it and work with it.

Every church needs to be able to answer two questions. First, what is our plan for making disciples? And second, does our plan work?

I had a sort of bad experiences as a playwright early on, when directors were putting in huge concepts that I didn’t intend, or they were stylizing something that was compromising the play

I think what we are confronting now is a new war of ideas. It’s not communism versus capitalism, but it is authoritarianism versus democracy and representative government.

The people to whom we minister and speak will not recall 99 percent of what we say to them, but they will never forget the kind of persons we are.

Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.

God’s aim in human history is the creation of an inclusive community of loving persons, with himself included as its primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.

The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.

My soul, be satisfied with flowers, with fruit, with weeds even; but gather them in the one garden you may call your own.

There is no way for a human being to come to God that does not involve surrender.