No life of faith can be lived privately. There must be overflow into the lives of others.
Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.
If you don’t take a Sabbath, something is wrong. You’re doing too much, you’re being too much in charge. You’ve got to quit, one day a week, and just watch what God is doing when you’re not doing anything.
The Bible is not a script for a funeral service, but it is the record of God always bringing life where we expected to find death. Everywhere it is the story of resurrection.
American culture is probably the least Christian culture that we’ve ever had because it is so materialistic and it’s so full of lies. The whole advertising world is just, it’s just intertwined with lies, appealing to the worst of the instincts we have.
Real faith is refined in the fires and storms of pain.
People are not problems to be solved. They are mysteries to be explored.
The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has a time of harvest. All suffering, pain, emptiness, disappointment is seed: sow it in God and He will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.
God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.
I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God’s business.
It’s essential for us to develop an imagination that is participatory. Art is the primary way in which this happens. It’s the primary way in which we become what we see or hear.
Love is not a word that describes my feelings; it is not a technique by which I fulfill my needs; it is not an ideal, abstract and pure, on which I meditate or discourse. It is acting in correspondence with or in response to God in relation to persons.
The silence that makes it possible to hear God speak also makes it possible for us to hear the world’s words for what they really are – tinny and unconvincing lies.
Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what’s common in human experience and turns it into something holy.
I believe God takes the things in our lives – family, background, education – and uses them as part of his calling. It might not be to become a pastor. But I don’t think God wastes anything.
When you are part of a megachurch, you have no responsibility to anybody else.
I get asked, ‘What do you miss most about being a pastor?’ I think it’s the intimacy, the incredible gift of intimacy. You go through death with somebody, with their families, and there’s an intimacy that comes through that that is just incomparable.
If people don’t know their pastor, it’s easy to put the pastor on a pedestal and depersonalize him or her. It’s also easy for pastors, who don’t know their congregations, simply to classify congregants as saved or unsaved, involved or not involved, tithers or non-tithers.
The life of faith is a daily exploration of the constant and countless ways in which Gods grace and love are expereinced.
I didn’t write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.