“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.”

The Gospel is that Jesus Christ came to earth, lived the life we should have lived and died the death we should have died.

It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.

Religion makes us proud of what we have done. The Gospel makes us proud of what Jesus has done.

Jesus Christ was treated as we deserved so that when we believe in Jesus, God treats us as Jesus deserves.

Only on the cross do you have a totally holy God and a totally loving God.

Forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness. To not retaliate is to absorb the cost.

So we find messages of self-salvation extremely attractive, whether they are religious (Keep these rules and you earn eternal blessing) or secular (Grab hold of these things and you’ll experience blessing now).

Prayer should be done regularly, persistently, resolutely, and tenaciously at least daily, whether we feel like it or not.

Money isn’t an idol. It just shows you where your idols are.

You dont fall into love. You commit to it. Love is saying I will be there no matter what.

Faith is living out and believing what truth is despite what you feel.

It is impossible to forgive someone if you feel superior to him or her.

Faith is not primarily a function of how you feel.

Love is the effort and desire to make someone else everything they were created to be.

When love of one’s people becomes an absolute, it turns into racism. When love of equality turns into a supreme thing, it can result in hatred and violence toward anyone who has led a privileged life. It is the settled tendency of human societies to turn good political causes into counterfeit gods.

Men, you’ll never be a good groom to your wife unless you’re first a good bride to Jesus.

Growing up as a black kid with a white father who loves you, who affirms you, who was part of your life is fundamentally different than what black people in my family were subjected to in the 19th century or the 18th century. But unfortunately, it doesn’t change the old racial order.

The U.S. affirms freedom of speech.[Vladimir] Putin is no friend of freedom of speech.

My purpose here is to affirm that the unitive state is a hidden path in itself, a movement in its own right that ultimately leads to no-self (no true-self and no-union). In short, the unitive state is the hidden path to no-self.

I love black because it affirms, designs and styles. A woman in a black dress is a pencil stroke.

It is saying less than the truth to affirm that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well-chosen and well-tended fruit tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals.

We affirm that the true story of capitalism is now beginning, because capitalism is not a system of oppression only, but is also a selection of values, a coordination of hierarchies, a more amply developed sense of individual responsibility.

Christianity affirms the value of each individual soul. Nazism denies it.

But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understand, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses.