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

How you experience your present is completely shaped by what you believe your ultimate future to be.

Where you find your significance is where you find your salvation.

God’s grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit their failure to perform and who acknowledge their need for a Savior.

The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe.

…Singles, too, must see the penultimate status of marriage. If single Christians don’t develop a deeply fulfilling love relationship with Jesus, they will put too much pressure on their DREAM of marriage, and that will create pathology in their lives as well.

No, he was in agony, and he looked down at us – denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him – and in the greatest act of love in history, he STAYED. He said, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.” He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.

In the original language, ‘Fear the Lord’ doesn’t mean be afraid. It means sustaining a joyful, astonished awe, and wonder before Him.

Are you living to justify yourself, or are you living because you are justified?

You are more sinful than you could dare imagine and you are more loved and accepted than you could ever dare hope.

Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they are guilty of it.

Everyone says they want community and friendship. But mention accountability or commitment to people, and they run the other way.

The way to find your calling is to look at the way you were created. Your gifts have not emerged by accident.

The gospel humbles us into the dust and at the very same time exalts us to the heavens.

Prayer is the way to experience a powerful confidence that God is handling our lives well, that our bad things will turn out for good, our good things cannot be taken from us, and the best things are yet to come.

If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.

The key question in order to change you is not ‘What would Jesus do?’ but “What has Jesus done for you?”

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

Do not be lazy. Run each day’s race with all your might, so that at the end you will receive the victory wreath from God. Keep on running even when you have had a fall.

In Great Britain, an author published a book in which he claimed that Jesus Christ had children. Such statements don’t trigger civil unrest and bloodshed in Europe. But write similar statements about Islam in Syria and you might see bloody uprisings.

And Jesus, the heart of the Christian faith is the wildest, most radical guy you’d ever come across.

You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.

Many great people over the centuries have depended on their faith- it is a sign of great strength to need Jesus in your life.

Prayer means talking over with Jesus everything that happens from morning until night.

With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.