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.
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.
It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you.
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.
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 you have money, power, and status today, it is due to the century and place in which you were born, to your talents and capacities and health, none of which you earned. In short, all your resources are in the end the gift of God.
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.
Men, you’ll never be a good groom to your wife unless you’re first a good bride to Jesus.
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.
[Spiritual friendship] is eagerly helping one another know, serve, love, and resemble God in deeper and deeper ways.
All change comes from deepening your understanding of the salvation of Christ and living out the changes that understanding creates in your heart.
Anyone who wonders if a Christian can sin is ignorant about sin’s enslaving nature.
Real love, the Bible says, instinctively desires permanence.
Our culture says that feelings of love are the basis for actions of love. And of course that can be true. But it is truer to say that actions of love can lead consistently to feelings of love.
Conversation with God leads to an encounter with God. Prayer turns theology into experience.
You (Millennials) are the generation most afraid of real community because it inevitably limits freedom and choice. Get over your fear.
Like a surgeon, friends cut you in order to heal you.
Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints.
Christ literally walked in our shoes and entered into our affliction. Those who will not help others until they are destitute reveal that Christ’s love has not yet turned them into the sympathetic persons the gospel should make them.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion. It can’t be co-opted by either moralism or relativism.
At Gethsemane: “Jesus is subordinating His loudest desires to His deepest desires.
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
Properly understood, the doctrine of sin means that believers are never as good as our true worldview should make us. Similarly, the doctrine of grace means as messed up their false worldview should make them.
Every artifact of human culture is a positive response to God’s general revelation and simultaneously a rebellious assertion against His sovereign rule over us.
Community service has become a patch for morality. You can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck.
While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.
No one has ever been deeply changed by an act of the will. The only thing that can re-forge and change a life at its root, is love.
Underneath all notions of justice is a set of faith assumptions that are essentially religious, and these are often not acknowledged.
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.
The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than alien intrusion of sin, as the villain.
…the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.
Humility is so shy. If you begin talking about it, it leaves.
Gratitude is what you feel. Thanksgiving is what you do.
The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life.
Tolerance isn’t about not having beliefs. It’s about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.
If there is a God, you owe him far more than a morally decent life. He deserves to be at the center of your life.
The weekly worship service can be very effective in evangelism of non-Christians and in edification of Christians if it does not aim at either alone but is gospel centered and in the vernacular.
A common vision can unite people of very different temperaments.
Idolatry means turning a good thing into the ultimate thing.
True love is generative. It is the only kind that makes more of itself as it goes along.
The only way your child will grow out of their dependency into self-sufficient adults is for you to essentially abandon your own independence for 20 years or so.
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?
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.
It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch.
We often forget how thirsty we are because we believe we will fulfill our dreams.
There is a third quality to friendship, and it is not as easy to put into a single word. The right word, literally, is “sympathy” – sym-pathos, common passion. This means that friendships are discovered more than they are created at will.
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.
What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse’s holiness.
Faith gives you a concept of the dignity and worth of all work, even simple work, without which work could bore you.