If you want to do the work of God, pay attention to people. Notice them. Especially the people nobody else notices.
When we live in the love of God, we begin to pay attention to people the way God pays attention to us.
Every day you and I walk through God’s shop. Every day we brush up against objects of incalculable worth to Him. People. Every one of them carries a price tag, if only we could see it.
If we are serious about loving God, we must begin with people, all people. And especially we must learn to love those that the world generally discards.
The ministry of bearing with one another is more than simply tolerating difficult people. It is also learning to hear God speak through them.
True joy, as it turns out, comes only to those who have devoted their lives to something greater than personal happiness.
As long as we have unsolved problems, unfulfilled desires, and a mustard seed of faith, we have all we need for a vibrant prayer life.
Skeptics would rather, even at their own expense, appear to be right than take the risk of trusting.
If I think God’s aim is to produce rule-followers, spiritual growth will always be an obligation rather than a desire of my heart.
We complicate our faith and lives in many ways, but at the core, our purpose is simple: We are called to love.
Christianity is like a nail,” he (Yemelian Yaroslavsky). “The harder you strike it, the deeper it goes.
The greatest bloodbaths in the history of the human race were recorded in the twentieth century in countries that sought to eliminate God, worship, and faith.
…sin is often the attempt to meet a legitimate need in an illegitimate way.
…all of us are somewhere on a journey to God, and the gap between least and most advanced is infinitely smaller than the gap between the most advanced and God himself.
Humility is the freedom to stop trying to be what we’re not, or pretending to be what we’re not, and accepting our ‘appropriate smallness.
Gratitude is the ability to experience life as a gift. It liberates us from the prison of self-preoccupation.
No heart is as whole as a broken heart, and no faith is as solid as a wounded faith.” Elie Wiesel
Skepticism can keep us from blessing, can keep us trapped in two minds.
A deep soul lives in conscious awareness of eternity, not simply today.
Leadership is the art of disappointing people at a rate they can stand.
We must minister out of weakness. The reason we help others is not because we are strong and they need us; it is because if we don’t help them, we will end up a hopeless relic.
We are not the passive victim of others’ opinions. Their opinions are powerless until we validate them.
The most important criterion is this: hire someone whose character and humility and attitude you would like to have reproduced in your church and in yourself.
When I teach the formal curriculum, I have the chance to think about it ahead of time. I can rehearse it. I can illustrate it with self-deprecating humor and humble-sounding personal disclosure. I can try to make it comes out just right.
Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done – like the kamikaze pilot who flew seventeen missions.
When preaching is done right, it can change lives. When it’s done badly, my failure goes beyond the merely human.
Learning something new is a fabulous way to be refreshed. When work can grind you down, something about learning a new activity thrills the soul. It reminds you that the world is bigger than your desk and your to-do list.
Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.
Death is the prerequisite to resurrection, the new life God intends.
At the heart of Christian faith is the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Jesus is why women have traveled continents, spent decades learning a strange language so they could translate the Gospel, planting churches, caring for the sick, educating the illiterate, and marching for the oppressed.
Love of learning led to monasteries, which became the cradle of academic guilds.
‘Amusement’ is appealing because we don’t have to think it spares us the fear and anxiety that might otherwise prey on our thoughts.
Churches need to figure out how they will address the spiritual lives of their staffs and leadership teams.
God has entrusted us with his most precious treasure – people. He asks us to shepherd and mold them into strong disciples, with brave faith and good character.
Politics, after all, is largely about power. And power goes to the core of our issues of control and narcissism and need to be right and tendency to divide the human race into ‘us’ vs. ‘them.’