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

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.

If you love anything in this world more than God, you will crush that object under the weight of your expectations.

The reason the stone was rolled away on Jesus’s tomb was not so that Jesus could get out, but so that we could get in.

Christians tend to motivate others with guilt. We tend to say: You would do this if you were really committed Christians, indicating that we are committed and all that is needed is for others to become as good as we are!

The Bible’s purpose is not so much to show you how to live a good life.

Our character is mainly shaped by our primary social community – the people with whom we eat, play, converse, and study.

There is no way to have a real relationship without becoming vulnerable to hurt. Christmas tells us that God became breakable and fragile.

We may think that we have stored things to suit our behavior, but usually we have unconsciously adjusted our actions to match where things are stored.

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.

If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

My theory was that what I had to do was make a study of human behavior.

The more refined one is, the more unhappy.

Behavior shapes emotions.

The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents, this isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule.