If you live for people’s acceptance, you’ll die from their rejection.
Success is not what I’ve done compared with what others have done. Success is what I’ve done compared with what God has called me to do.
Scars are the evidence that wounds can heal. That wounds don’t last forever. That healing is possible.
A person can be removed from slavery in an instant, but it takes a lifetime for slavery to be removed from a person.
I had made the same mistake a lot of Christians make: I saw my connection with God as a contractual relationship, rather than a covenantal relationship. All contracts have terms, but covenants don’t. They last forever. In a contractual relationship, you’re always worried about breaking the rules. In a covenantal relationship, you’re only concerned with loving the other party as much as you can.
But when people try to avoid suffering by sinning, they end up sinning their way into suffering. And.
But before God could change me, He needed to mature me. And before God could mature me, He needed to move me.
My desire for acceptance is one of the crosses that I carry. Each morning I have to attend a funeral. My own. I have to wake up and once again die to my desires for people’s approval.
Rather than thinking about the world in the categories of simply good and evil, a biblical worldview helps us think in categories of good and redeemable.
Life on earth has sharp teeth.