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?
The hidden dimension of each human life is not visible to others, nor is it fully graspable even by ourselves. We usually know very little about the things that move in our own soul, the deepest level of our life, or what is driving it. Our “within” is astonishingly complex and subtle – even devious. It takes on a life of its own. Only God knows our depths, who we are, and what we would do.
If the Bible says something once, notice it but don’t count it as a fundamental principle. If it says it twice, think about it twice. If it is repeated many times, then dwell on it and seek to understand it. What you want to believe from the Bible is its message on the whole and use it as a standard for interpreting the peripheral passages.
Much of our effort to do things for the Lord is really the resurgence of our desire to dominate and make things happen in our own strength.
Christians certainly aren’t perfect. There will always be need for improvement. But there is a lot of room between being perfect and being “just forgiven” as that is nowadays understood. You could be much more than forgiven and still not be perfect.
An obsession merely with doing all God commands may be the very thing that rules out being the kind of person that he calls us to be.
Hell is not an ‘oops!’ or a slip. One does not miss heaven by a hair, but by constant effort to avoid and escape God.