Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If your church conveys that spirit of condescension or judgment, it's likely not a place where grace is on tap.
As Ecclesiastes tells it, a wholesale devotion to pleasure will, paradoxically, lead to a state of utter despair.
In the stories of extravagant grace given to us by Jesus, there are no loopholes disqualifying us from God's love.
Be still. In that focus, all else comes into focus. In that rift in my routine, the universe falls into alignment.
We should do whatever we can to cut through the scum that has grown on our understanding and rediscover freshness.
We need faith and the mind of the Lord Jesus to recognize something of lasting value in even our most ordinary tasks.
The Christian sees the world as a transitional home badly in need of rehab, and we are active agents in that project.
I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.
True healing, of deep connective tissue, takes place in community. Where is God when it hurts? Where God's people are.
It's easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you've heard everything before and that you have nothing left to learn.
Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.
Whenever faith seems an entitlement, or a measuring rod, we cast our lots with the Pharisees and grace softly slips away.
What a nation needs more than anything else is not a Christian ruler in the palace but a Christian prophet within earshot.
Prayer is to the skeptic a delusion, a waste of time. To the believer it represents perhaps the most important use of time.
Sometimes I feel like the most liberal person among conservatives, and sometimes like the most conservative among liberals.
People instinctively know the difference between something done with a profit motive and something done with a love motive.
Grace is the most perplexing, powerful force in the universe, and, I believe, the only hope for our twisted, violent planet.
The Gospels and the rest of the New Testament reflect the life of Jesus, what it means for us & what it means for the world.
By focusing too myopically on what we want God to do on our behalf, we may miss the significance of what he has already done.
... we need to reclaim the "goodnewness" of the gospel, and the best place to start is to rediscover the good news ourselves.
If God consistently sent lightning bolts in response to bad doctrine, our planet would sparkle nightly like a Christmas tree.
In a nutshell, the Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 22 tells the story of a God reckless with desire to get his family back.
I have yet to find any support in the Bible for an attitude of smugness: Ah, they deserve their punishment; watch them squirm.
And perhaps, exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit may be our very best defense against a materialist view of mankind here on earth.
All too often the church holds up a mirror reflecting back the society around it, rather than a window revealing a different way.
The more we love, and the more unlikely people we love, the more we resemble God - who, after all, loves ornery creatures like us.
A philosophy may explain difficult things, but has no power to change them. The gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change.
We do well to remember that the Bible has far more to say about how to live during the journey than about the ultimate destination.
The proof of spiritual maturity is not how pure you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.
Christ bears the wounds of the church, his body, just as he bore the wounds of crucifixion. I sometimes wonder which have hurt worse.
God formed an alliance based on the world as it is, full of flaws, whereas prayer calls God to account for the world as it should be.
For me, prayer is not so much me setting out a shopping list of requests for God to consider as it is a way of keeping company with God.
Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more . . . And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less
Jesus was a master of grace: he attracted sinners and moral outcasts even as he offended the religious and responsible people of his day.
We admit that we will never reach our ideal in this life, a distinctive the church claims that most other human institutions try to deny.
For me, prayer is not so much me setting out a shopping list of requests for God to consider as it is a way of 'keeping company with God.'
Jesus did not give the parables to teach us how to live. He gave them, I believe, to correct our notions about who God is and who God loves.
If my activism, however well-motivated, drives out love, then I have misunderstood Jesus’ gospel. I am stuck with law, not the gospel of grace.
As a writer, I play with words all day long. I toy with them, listen for their overtones, crack them open, and try to stuff my thoughts inside.
The church is, above all, a place to receive grace: it brings forgiven people together with the aim of equipping us to dispense grace to others.
When I am tempted to complain about God's lack of presence, I remind myself that God has much more reason to complain about my lack of presence.
Never do I see Jesus lecturing people on the need to accept blindness or lameness as an expression of God's secret will; rather, he healed them.
God does not accept me conditionally, on the basis of my performance, but bestows his love and forgiveness freely, despite my innumerable failures.
The surgery of life hurts. It helps me, though, to know that the surgeon himself, the Wounded Surgeon, has felt every stab of pain and every sorrow.
Unless we love natural goods - sex, alcohol, food, money, success, power - in the way God intended, we become their slaves, as any addict can attest.
God does not seem impressed by size or power or wealth. Faith is what he wants, and the heroes who emerge are heroes of faith, not strength or wealth.
When I write, I try to represent the ordinary person in the pew, which means that, ironically, I'm qualified to write about prayer by being unqualified!
Whatever makes us feel superior to other people, whatever tempts us to convey a sense of superiority, that is the gravity of our sinful nature, not grace.
...to see that God does answer, in great things as well as small, the prayers of those who put their trust in Him will strengthen the faith of multitudes.
When I don't know the answer to something, I write a book about it because it gives me a chance to explore it and go to some people who do have the answers.