“Why doesn’t God just force us to do the things he knows to be right? It is because that would lose precisely that which he has intended in our creation: freely chosen character.”

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?

Theology is a part of our lives. It’s unavoidable. A thoughtless theology guides our lives with just as much force as a thoughtful and informed one.

When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.

It’s all about confidence-boosting and putting on armor.

I mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented… I feel I am blundering in concepts too fine for me.

When I finally got up to Industrial Light And Magic to work on the ‘Star Wars’ movies as a model-maker, it felt like dying and going to heaven.

We breathe love as we breathe air; we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us.

Whatever is beautiful is beautiful by necessity.

At the center of care for the heart is the love of God. This must be the joyful aim of our life.

A disciple is a person who has decided that the most important thing in their life is to learn how to do what Jesus said to do.