"The main problem in a person's life is never his suffering, it's his sin."

"The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope."

"Only with time do we really learn who the other person is and come to love the person for him- or herself and not just for the feelings and experiences they give us."

"When over the years someone has seen you at your worst, and knows you with all your strengths and flaws, yet commits him- or herself to you wholly, it is a consummate experience. To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. 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."

"You (Millennials) are the generation most afraid of real community because it inevitably limits freedom and choice. Get over your fear."

"A common vision can unite people of very different temperaments."

"To let the gospel of Jesus shape how we work means to heed the influence of both the psychological idols within our hearts as well as the sociological idols in our culture and profession."

"The essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less."

"Jesus Christ says, 'Kill me and in 3 days, not only this temple, but all temples in the whole world will be out of business.' This is the most stunning thing any human being has ever said."

"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."

"Falling in love in a Christian way is to say,'I am excited about your future and I want to be part of getting you there. I'm signing up for the journey with you. Would you sign up for the journey to my true self with me? It's going to be hard but I want to get there."

"The answer is that their confidence was actuallh in God, not in their limited understanding of what they thought he would do. They had inner assurance that God would rescue them. However, they were not so arrogant as to be sure they were 'reading God right.' They knew that God was under no obligation to operate according to their limited wisdom."

"In any relationship, there will be frightening spells in which your feelings of love dry up. And when that happens you must remember that the essence of marriage is that it is a covenant, a commitment, a promise of future love. So what do you do? You do the acts of love, despite your lack of feeling. You may not feel tender, sympathetic, and eager to please, but in your actions you must BE tender, understanding, forgiving and helpful. And, if you do that, as time goes on you will not only get through the dry spells, but they will become less frequent and deep, and you will become more constant in your feelings. This is what can happen if you decide to love."

"If you go to Jesus to get a new personality, Lewis says, you still haven't really gone to Jesus. Your real self will not come out as long as you are looking for it; it will only emerge when you're looking for Him."

"We are continuing God's work of forming, filling, and subduing. Whenever we bring order out of chaos, whenever we draw out creative potential, whenever we elaborate and 'unfold creation beyond where it was when we found it, we are following God's pattern of creative cultural development."

"If your fundamental is a man dying on the cross for his enemies, if the very heart of your self-image and your religion is a man praying for his enemies as he died for them, sacrificing for them, loving them - if that sinks into your heart of hearts, it's going to produce the kind of life that the early Christians produced. The most inclusive possible life out of the most exclusive possible claim - and that is this is the truth. But what is the truth? The truth is a God become weak, loving and dying for the people who opposed him, dying forgiving them."

"Conversation with God leads to an encounter with God. Prayer turns theology into experience."

"When anything in life is an absolute requirement for your happiness and self-worth, it is essentially an 'idol,' something you are actually worshiping. When such a thing is threatened, your anger is absolute. Your anger is actually the way the idol keeps you in its service, in its chains. Therefore if you find that, despite all the efforts to forgive, your anger and bitterness cannot subside, you may need to look deeper and ask, 'What am I defending? What is so important that I cannot live without?' It may be that, until some inordinate desire is identified and confronted, you will not be able to master your anger."

"The gospel is neither religion nor irreligion - it is something else altogether. Religion makes law and moral obedience a means of salvation, while irreligion makes the individual a law to him - or herself. The gospel, however, is that Jesus takes the law of God so seriously that He paid the penalty of disobedience, so we can be saved by sheer grace."

"While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage."

"The basic premise of religion-that if you live a good life, things will go well for you-is wrong. Jesus was the most morally upright person who ever lived, yet he had a life filled with the experience of poverty, rejection, injustice, and even torture."

"To the degree you experience God's love towards you - seeing you as beautiful and radiant - to that degree sex won't ruin your life."

"Like a surgeon, friends cut you in order to heal you."

"While Christianity was able to agree with pagan writers that inordinate attachment to earthly goods can lead to unnecessary pain and grief, it also taught that the answer to this was not to love things less but to love God more than anything else. Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope."

"We instinctively tend to limit for whom we exert ourselves. We do it for people like us, and for people whom we like. Jesus will have none of that. By depicting a Samaritan helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all in need - regardless of race, politics, class, and religion - is your neighbour. Not everyone is your brother or sister in faith, but everyone is your neighbour, and you must love your neighbour."

"All change comes from deepening your understanding of the salvation of Christ and living out the changes that understanding creates in your heart."

"Many say that it is ethnocentric to claim that our religion is superior to others. Yet isn't that very statement ethnocentric? Most non-Western cultures have no problem saying that their culture and religion is best. The idea that it is wrong to do so is deeply rooted in Western traditions of self-criticism and individualism. To charge others with the 'sin' of ethnocentrism is really a way of saying, 'Our culture's approach to other cultures is superior to yours."

"The proper biblical understanding of sin is much more radical and far-reaching. It can never be used as a weapon, because it will recoil on anyone who tries to deploy it that way."

"As I took up life as a minister, I tried to understand why so many people resisted and rejected God, I soon realized that perhaps that main reason was affliction and suffering. ...But at the same time, I learned that just as many people find God through affliction and suffering. They find that adversity moves them toward God rather than away. ...When pain and suffering come upon us, we finally see not only that we are not in control of our lives, but that we never were."

"Work is so foundational to our makeup that it is one of the few things we can take in significant doses without harm. Indeed, the Bible does not say we should work one day and rest six or that work and rest should be balanced evenly but directs us to the opposite ratio. Leisure and pleasure are great goods, but we can take only so much of them."

"True love is generative. It is the only kind that makes more of itself as it goes along."

"We must say to ourselves something like this: 'Well, when Jesus looked down from the cross, he didn't think 'I am giving myself to you because you are so attractive to me.' 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. That is why I am going to love my spouse.' Speak to your heart like that, and then fulfill the promises you made on your wedding day."

"If you try to add to God's salvation you subtract. If you try to add to God's salvation you subtract. If you try to merit God's salvation you haven't believed at all, even if you try to do a little bit."

"Humility is so shy. If you begin talking about it, it leaves."

"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. God's saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent. The conviction and repentance moves us to cling to and rest in God's mercy and grace."

"The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion. It can't be co-opted by either moralism or relativism."

"Jesus, unlike the founder of any other major faith, holds out hope for ordinary human life. Our future is not an ethereal, impersonal form of consciousness. We will not float through the air, but rather will eat, embrace, sing, laugh, and dance in the kingdom of God, in degrees of power, glory, and joy that we can't at the present imagine."

"The Christian Gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead, I think of myself less."

"If believers in God don't honor the cries and claims of the poor, we don't honor him, whatever we profess, because we hide his beauty from the eyes of the world. When we pour ourselves out for the poor-that gets the world's notice."

"I asked her what was so scary about unmerited free grace? She replied something like this: 'If I was saved by my good works -- then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with rights. I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if it is really true that I am a sinner saved by sheer grace -- at God's infinite cost -- then there's nothing he cannot ask of me."

"The early church was strikingly different from the culture around it in this way - the pagan society was stingy with its money and promiscuous with its body. A pagan gave nobody their money and practically gave everybody their body. And the Christians came along and gave practically nobody their body and they gave practically everybody their money."

"In other words, we are only proud of being more successful, more intelligent or more good-looking than the next person, and we are in the presence of someone who is more successful, intelligent and good-looking than we are, we lose all pleasure in what we had. That is because we really had no pleasure in it. We were proud of it."

"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."

"On Christ's attitude toward His disciples: 'If I gave away My big all to get to you, can you give away your little all to follow Me?"

"Spiritual friendship is eagerly helping one another know, serve, love, and resemble God in deeper and deeper ways."

"Underneath all notions of justice is a set of faith assumptions that are essentially religious, and these are often not acknowledged."

"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."

"Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won't! You'll have ...A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it."

"Our Western society is so deeply divided between these two approaches (moralism, self-discovery) that hardly anyone can conceive of any other way to live. If you criticize or distance yourself from one, everyone assumes you have chosen to follow the other, because each of these approaches tends to divide the whole world into two basic groups. The moral conformists say: 'the immoral people -- the people who 'do their own thing' -- are the problem with the world, and moral people are the solution.' The advocates of self-discovery say: 'The bigoted peole -- the people who say, 'We have the Truth' -- are the problem with the world, and progressive people are the solution."

"Marriage has the power to set the course of your life as a whole. If your marriage is strong, even if all the circumstances in your life around you are filled with trouble and weakness, it won't matter. You will be able to move out into the world in strength."