“In Spiritual formation we are aiming at a character and life that is so shaped that the deeds of Christ routinely and easily come from what is inside.”

Your mind will really talk to you when you begin to deny fulfillment to your desires, and you will find how subtle and shameless it is.

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.

It’s very difficult to be right about something without hurting someone with it.

Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It’s like education. Everyone gets an education; it’s just a matter of which one you get.

Find a person who has embraced anger, and you will find a person with a wounded ego.

We cannot handle injustice by finding more ways to impose what is in fact “right” on people. It has to come from the inside. And that’s where the church should be working.

The transformation of the social world is at its heart the transformation of personal relations. That’s the key to transforming society in the larger arena.

As we reach out to God, we get another source of strength.

If we are to use our minds rightly, we must live in an attitude of constant openness and learning.

The different parts of the automobile like the ignition switch, the various buttons, the steering wheel – the interfaces between the driver and the machine – is our spirit or heart.

Spiritual people are not those who engage in certain spiritual practices; they are those who draw their life from a conversational relationship with God.

If we allow everything access to our mind, we are simply asking to be kept in a state of mental turmoil or bondage. For nothing enters the mind without having an effect for good or evil.

Kingdom obedience is kingdom abundance.

We are built to live in the kingdom of God. It is our natural habitat.

It is the responsibility of every Christ-centred follower to carve out a satisfying life under the loving rule of God or else sin will start to look good.

It’s just stunning to watch churches struggle to get mission statements when there it is, the Great Commission, and they should simply do what it says.

That’s the illusion – the idea that you can be all right on the inside and not act it out – and it has affected us in many ways. That’s a part of the idea that professing is enough.

Probably I’m more of a fan of the literary references than the pop-culture references. But I do go to the pop-culture well quite frequently because people, I think, are sort of inherently ready to laugh at that. It’s a free laugh almost. Usually, everybody gets it.

If there are one hundred thousand damned souls for one saved soul, the devil has always the advantage without having given up his son to death.

Such words as ‘God’ and ‘Death’ and ‘Suffering’ and ‘Eternity’ are best forgotten. We have to become as simple and as wordless as the growing corn or the falling rain. We must just be.

A great nose may be an index Of a great soul.

Skeptics would rather, even at their own expense, appear to be right than take the risk of trusting.

After each creative act one has to be sustained by one’s strength of character, by a moral sense, by I don’t know what, lest one tumble.

Or holds them of no account in the estimate of his origin and place in the created world.