“I hate how hard spiritual transformation is and how long it takes. I hate thinking about how many people have gone to church for decades and remain joyless or judgmental or bitter or superior.”

I’m more concerned about who you’re becoming than what you’re doing.

Peace does not lie in getting God to give me other circumstances. Peace lies in finding God in these circumstances.

The miracle of Sunday is that a dead man lives. The miracle of Saturday is that the eternal Son of God lies dead.

If I have the courage to acknowledge my limits and embrace them, I can experience enormous freedom. If I lack this courage, I will be imprisoned by them.

Gratitude is the ability to experience life as a gift. It liberates us from the prison of self-preoccupation.

One of the most painful aspects of suffering is the loneliness of it. Others may offer support or empathy, but no one can walk the road to Moriah in our place.

God is so immense that if he were ‘too visible,’ people would give forced compliance without expressing their heart. So God made it possible, in enormous love, for us to live as if he were not there.

The ministry of bearing with one another is learning to hear God speak through difficult people.

Our beliefs are not just estimates of probabilities. They are also the instruments that guide our actions.

Both hope and pessimism are deeply contagious. And no one is more infectious than a leader.

We who preach have one tool. We are people of the book.

The problem with spending your life climbing up the ladder is that you will go right past Jesus, for he’s coming down.

What matters is not the accomplishments you achieve; what matters is the person you become.

Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes.

Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.

Every human being who has ever lived has suffered from a messiah complex-except one.

When you think that it’s too hard, remember that in the long run, doing the things that will make you successful is a lot easier than being unsuccessful.

All the hardest, coldest people you meet were once as soft as water. And that’s the tragedy of living.

I’m such a control freak, and it’s very hard for me to lose my inhibitions without something chemical inside me.

The hardest thing to judge is what level of risk is safe.

Everything that is hard to attain is easily assailed by the generality of men.

The hardest thing about being a leader is demonstrating or showing vulnerability. And that has a lot to do with trust.

A mouse trying hard to come off as a lion.

I am so weak that I can hardly write, I cannot read my Bible, I cannot even pray, I can only lie still in God’s arms like a little child, and trust.