When Jesus directs us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence.
To depart from righteousness is to choose a life of crushing burdens, failures, and disappointments, a life caught in the toils of endless problems that are never resolved.
God inducts us into the eternal kind of life that flows through himself. He does this first by bringing that life to bear upon our needs, and then by diffusing it throughout our deeds – deeds done with expectation that he and his Father will act with and in our actions.
And the God who hears is also the one who speaks. He has spoken and is still speaking. Humanity remains his project, not its own, and his initiatives are always at work among us.
Knowing the ‘right answers’ does not mean we believe them. To believe them means to act as though they’re true.
Keep eternity before the children.
Theology is just what you really think about God, and if you’re going to do that, you’d better use your mind and not just let it be a receptacle – a catch-all for whatever beliefs happen to be passing by.
Business is a primary arrangement on God’s part for people to love one another and serve one another.
The hardest thing about leadership is the intimacy it requires.
At the center of care for the heart is the love of God. This must be the joyful aim of our life.
When we pass through what we call death, we do not lose the world. Indeed, we see it for the first time as it really is.
The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes- a time for men and women to be heroic in their faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low.
The adult members of churches today rarely raise serious religious questions for fear of revealing their doubts or being thought of as strange. There is an implicit conspiracy of silence on religious matters in the churches. This conspiracy covers up the fact that the churches do not change lives or influence conduct to any appreciable degree.
Anything done in anger can be done better without it!
To manipulate, drive or manage people is not the same thing as to lead them.
He said, “The main thing that you bring the church is the person that you become, and that’s what everybody will see; that’s what will get reproduced; that’s what people will believe. Arrange your life so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy and confidence in your everyday life with God.
He saves us by realistic restoration of our heart to God and then by dwelling there with his Father through the distinctively divine Spirit. The heart thus renovated and inhabited is the only real hope of humanity on earth.
We truly live at the mercy of our ideas; this is never more true than with our ideas about God.
Still today the Old Testament book of Psalms gives great power for faith and life. This is simply because it preserves a conceptually rich language about God and our relationships to him. If you bury yourself in Psalms, you emerge knowing God and understanding life.
Many people think of Jesus as our Savior, as the one who will get us into heaven. So the question often is “Have I accepted Jesus as my Savior?” But we never ask the question “Have I accepted Jesus as my teacher?