If we are not deliberately thinking about our culture and our context, we will be conformed to it without ever knowing.Collection: Thinking
Christmas is an invitation by God to say: Look what I've done to come near to you. Now draw near to me...I want to be a friend.Collection: Looks
God loves and defends those with the least economic and social power, and so should we.Collection: God Love
Work is taking the raw material of creation and developing it for the sake of others.Collection: Raw Materials
If God does not have our highest allegiance, we will use prayer to try to get things that have that designation.Collection: Prayer
A person's faith can collapse almost overnight if she failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.Collection: Reflection
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.Collection: Trying
It takes more than a great church to reach a city, it takes a great movement of churches.Collection: Cities
God has become human. The absolute has become particular. The ideal has become real. The divine has taken up a human nature.Collection: Real
In a smaller church your pastoring sets up your preaching. In a larger church your preaching sets up your pastoring.Collection: Church
Religion says, 'I obey; therefore I am accepted.' Christianity says, 'I'm accepted, therefore I obey.Collection: Christianity
Adam wasn't lonely because he was imperfect but because he was perfect. The ache for friends is not the result of sin.Collection: Lonely
When people say, "God is love," I think they mean that love is extremely important, or that God really wants us to love. But in Christian conception, God really has love as his essence.Collection: Love
Tolerance is not the absence of belief. Tolerance is how your beliefs teach you to treat other peopleCollection: People
To be a Christian is a standing, a legal position. It means to be a child of God. You are or you are not, there is no try.Collection: Christian
Your heart is smothering under your small ambitions.Collection: Heart
Every religion has a prophet who is pointing people to God. Jesus is the only one who says, 'I am God, and I am coming to find you.'Collection: Jesus
There seems to be a human instinct for prayer. Swiss theologian Karl Barth calls it our 'incurable God-sickness.'Collection: Prayer
Because creation was made in the image of a God who is equally one and many, the human race will finally be reunited and our racial and cultural diversity will remain intact in the renewed world. The human race finally lives together in peace and interdependence. Glory to God in the highest goes with peace on earth.Collection: Race
At the end of history the whole earth has become the Garden of God again. Death and decay and suffering are gone. . . . Jesus will make the world our perfect home again. We will no longer be living 'east of Eden,' always wandering and never arriving. We will come, and the father will meet us and embrace us, and we will be brought into the feast.Collection: Jesus
The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life.Collection: Artist
On the cross Jesus was treated as an outcast so that we could be brought into God's family freely by grace.Collection: Jesus
If God wiped out all sources of evil in the world we would no longer be here, the evil is inside us.Collection: Evil
I am accepted by God through the work of Jesus Christ - therefore I obeyCollection: Jesus
Many people think of the Bible as a book of moral teachings with stories sprinkled through to illustrate the teachings. But it's a lot BETTER THAN THAT...the Bible is a single true story with teachings sprinkled through to illustrate the story.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Money Power
What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.Collection: Heart
The cross is the place where we find the freedom to accept ourselves without being proud and to challenge ourselves without being crushed.Collection: Challenges
Discipleship is not an option. Jesus says that if anyone would come after me, he must follow me.Collection: Jesus
If you seek to serve people more than to gain power, you will not only serve people, you will gain influence.Collection: People
There are many ways to cover up our sin. We may justify or minimize it by blaming circumstances and others people. However, real repentance first admits sin as sin and takes full responsibility. True confession and repentance begins when blame shifting ends...Just as real repentance begins only where blame shifting ends, so it also begins where self-pity ends, and we start to turn from our sin out of love for God rather than mere self-interest.Collection: Real
Without the gospel we hate ourselves instead of our sin. Without the gospel we’re motivated through all sorts of awful fear and pride to change and it doesn’t really change our hearts; it just restrains our hearts.Collection: Hate
God will only give you what you would have asked for if you knew everything he knowsCollection: God
God is so committed to your ultimate joy that he was willing to plunge into the greatest depths of suffering himself for you.Collection: Joy
In the church we have to deliberately let ourselves be transparent and accountable to others. We're a family.Collection: Church
Jesus cannot be just liked. His claims make us either kill him or crown him.Collection: Jesus
Most churches make the mistake of selecting as leaders the confident, the competent, and the successful. But what you most need in a leader is someone who has been broken by the knowledge of his or her sin, and even greater knowledge of Jesus' costly graceCollection: Jesus
People only get in the afterlife what they have most wanted-either to have God as Savior and Master or to be their own Saviors and Masters.Collection: Afterlife
Only if you are part of a community of believers seeking to resemble, serve, and love Jesus will you ever get to know him and grow into his likeness.Collection: Jesus
If you're a Christian how do you deal with stress without Jesus? You don't.Collection: Christian
Only in Jesus Christ do we see how the untamable, infinite God can become a baby and a loving Savior. On the cross we see how both the love and the holiness of God can be fulfilled at once.Collection: God
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.Collection: Love
If you add anything to Jesus as a requirement for being happy, that's your real king.Collection: Jesus
Life changing repentance begins where blame shifting ends.Collection: Life Changing
Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavors, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God's calling, can matter forever.Collection: Reality
It is remarkable that in all of his writings Paul's prayers for his friends contain no appeals for changes in their circumstances.Collection: Change
All life-changing love is inconvenient.Collection: Life Changing
You are under-qualified for the job of God.Collection: Jobs
Accepted in Christ, we now run the race 'for the joy that is set before us' rather than 'for fear that comes behind us'.Collection: Running