“Wise people build their lives around what is eternal and squeeze in what is temporary. Not the other way around.”

In reality, each thought we have carries with it a little spiritual power, a tug toward or away from God. No thought is purely neutral.

When preaching is done right, it can change lives. When it’s done badly, my failure goes beyond the merely human.

Ever console or scold people hurt in human relationships that satisfaction comes from God alone? Stop. Adam’s fellowship with God was perfect, and God Himself declared Adam needed other humans.

God sees with utter clarity who we are. He is undeceived as to our warts and wickedness. But when God looks at us that is not all He sees. He also sees who we are intended to be, who we will one day become.

What repeatedly enters your mind and occupies your mind, eventually shapes your mind, and will ultimately express itself in what you do and who you become.

sometimes we do not realize how much we have to be grateful for until it is threatened.

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

Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.

Jesus associated with the outcasts; he spoke with them, touched them, ate with them, loved them.

It only makes sense to ask God for guidance in the context of a life committed to “seeking first the kingdom.”

The primary goal of spiritual life is human transformation.

Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done – like the kamikaze pilot who flew seventeen missions.

The only cure from sin is by maintaining a vision of God.

We’d like to be humble…but what if no one notices?

One of the great illusions of our time is that hurrying will buy us more time.

The church is in the hope business.

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.

Though God alone never tastes woe, Yet that man is happy, and poets sing of him, Who conquers with hand or swift foot And wins the greatest of prizes By steadfastness and strength.

I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.

I imagine a soul is a little perfect crystal egg floating in your chest.

The hankering of the mind is irresistible.