Am I getting braver, or just getting accustomed to being terrified?
Tomorrow’s character is made out of today’s thoughts. Temptation may come suddenly, but sin doesn’t.
There is a powerful relationship between our true spiritual condition and our attitude and actions concerning money and possessions.
It’s always easier to avoid temptation than to resist it.
We are [God’s] by creation, and again by redemption. He has every right to tell me what to do with my mind and body. I have. I right to do whatever I want with my body.
[Nathan] wasn’t blindly obsessed with a possession. He wasn’t crazy. He was a hero–a father who’d risked his life to rescue his son.
Are we truly obeying the command to love our neighbor as ourselves if we’re storing up money for potential future needs when our neighbor is laboring today under actual present needs?
If we can keep ourselves from interfering with the natural laws of life, mistakes can be our child’s finest teachers.
A disciple does not ask, “How much can I keep?” but, “How much more can I give?” Whenever we start to get comfortable with our level of giving, it’s time to raise it again.
Father to teenage son: “My relationship with you is more important than anything I’ve got to say to you.
Abundance isn’t God’s provision for me to live in luxury. It’s his provision for me to help others live. God entrusts me with his money not to build my kingdom on earth, but to build his kingdom in heaven.
Why ask for your daily bread when you own the bakery?
God doesn’t make us rich so we can indulge ourselves and spoil our children, or so we can insulate ourselves form needing God’s provision. God gives us abundant material blessing so that we can give it away, and give it generously.
Wealth is a relational barrier. It keeps us from having open relationships.
In the midst of prosperity, the challenge for believers is to handle wealth in such a way that it acts as a blessing, not a curse.
Good-hearted laughter is a tribute to the happy God, who created laughter and delights to enter into it with us.
Unless we learn how to humbly tell each other our giving stories, our churches will not learn to give.
She was home (in Heaven). She was with the Person she was made for, in the place that was made for her.
If Miss Watson had told Huck what the Bible says about living in a resurrected body and being with people we love on a resurrected Earth with gardens and rivers and mountains and untold adventures–now that would have gotten his attention.
Because satan hates us, he’s determined to rob us of the joy we’d have if we believed what God tells us about the magnificent world to come.
For the Christian, death is not the end of adventure but a doorway from a wold where dreams and adventures shrink, to a world where dreams and adventures forever expand.
We are all theologians, either good ones or bad ones. I’d rather be a good one. Wouldn’t you?
Yanked out of the present, Adam discovered the richness of the past in people’s stories.
We should remember Christ’s words, ‘Let nothing be wasted,’ when we look in our refrigerators and garbage cans and garages.
Whenever we have excess, giving should be our natural response. It should be the automatic decision, the obvious thing to do in light of Scripture and human need.
Many [Western Christians] habitually think and act as if there is no eternity. . . . We major in the momentary and minor in the momentous.
Someday this upside-down world will be turned right side up. Nothing in all eternity will turn it back again. If we are wise, we will use our brief lives on earth positioning ourselves for the turn.
Jesus’ miracles provide us with a sample of the meaning of redemption: a freeing of creation from the shackles of sin and evil and a reinstatement of creaturely living as intended by God.
Too often we assume that God has increased our income to increase our standard of living, when his stated purpose is to increase our standard of giving. (Look again at 2 Corinthians 8:14 and 9:11).
God prospers me not to raise my standard of living, but to raise my standard of giving.
Worry is momentary atheism crying out for correction by trust in a good, sovereign God. Suffering breaks self-reliance.
it’s my responsibility to cultivate the man in my son. I can’t be passive about that.
What you do with your resources in this life is your autobiography.