“The purpose of Jesus’s coming is to put the whole world right, to renew and restore the creation, not to escape it.”

The more you understand how your salvation isn’t about your behavior, the more radically your behavior will change.

If God is not at the center of your life, something else is.

When we worry we are saying, ‘I know the way my life is supposed to go, and God’s not getting it right’.

The Gospel is good news not good advice. Advice = what we should do. News = report of what was done for us.

God became someone we could hurt. Why? To get us back… No other religion-whethe r secularism, Greco-Roman paganism, Eastern religion, Judaism, or Islam-believes God became breakable or suffered or had a body.

Christ did not suffer so you wouldn’t suffer. He suffered so when you suffer you will become like Him.

Yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.

If the church does not identify with the marginalized, it will itself be marginalized. This is God’s poetic justice.

If we have not seen our sin and sought radical forgiveness from God, we will be unable to forgive and to seek the good of those who have wronged us.

The cross is the place where the Judge takes the Judgment.

Success and suffering will either darken your heart or make you wise, but they won’t leave you where you were.

The prerequisite for receiving the grace of God is to know you need it.

The infallible test of spiritual integrity, Jesus says, is your private prayer life.

When Job was prospering, he prayed. When he was suffering, he still prayed.

Religion says earn your life. Secular society says create your life. Jesus says, ‘My life for your life.

Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it.

By the help of microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible world discovered to the understanding.

Nature does not make leaps.

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

I’m not running, I’m not planning on running, and I’ve got nothing new on that story.

When any calamity is suffered, the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

The moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable…that what we take for granted may not be here for our children

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.