We spend so much time trying to put send to death that we don’t spend enough time striving to know God deeply, trying to gaze upon the wonder of Jesus Christ and have that transform our affections to the point where our love and hope are steadfastly on Christ.
Heaven is not a place for those who are afraid of hell; it’s a place for those who love God.
The Christian views trials as a pathway to maturity.
Because a God who is ultimately most focused on his own glory will be about the business of restoring us, who are all broken images of him. His glory demands it. So we should be thankful for a self-sufficient God whose self-regard is glorious.
Have you read your Bible or has the Bible read you?
Grace-driven effort wants to get to the bottom of behavior, not just manage behavior. If you’re simply managing behavior but not removing the roots of that behavior, then the weeds simply sprout up in another place.
We can never grasp the extent of our depravity until we recognize the excellencies of our created dignity.
Trying to figure out God is like trying to catch a fish in the Pacific Ocean with an inch of dental floss.
Our senses are never more awakened to our need for His love than when our need is most exposed.
We’ve been given the covenant community because we need each other, and together we’ll be more mature, experience more life, and know more joy than we ever would apart from one another.
The spiritual power in the gospel is denied when we augment or adjusting gospel into no gospel at all. When we doubt the message alone is the power of God for salvation we start adding or subtracting, trusting our own powers of persuasion or presentation.
Worship is the way of life for those entranced by and passionate for the glory of God.
Apart from worshiping God, everything becomes superficial. But when you understand the driving force behind everything, all of a sudden there’s an eternal amount of joy at our disposal, because everything we do is enlightened and enlivened by the endless glory of the eternal God.
No one can out-sin the cross of Christ.
Many of the things that stifle growth are morally neutral. They’re not bad things. Facebook is not bad. Television and movies are not bad. I enjoy TV, but it doesn’t take long for me to begin to find humorous on TV what the Lord finds heartbreaking.
There’s a strong victim mentality in my generation. I think it’s spiritual laziness. They will agree that God is sovereign over all, but then they will say, “Well, I wish he would sovereignly take away my lust issue.” There’s just not a lot of fortitude, not a lot of fight in them.
I preach hard against that idea and plead with people to make war against sin. I tell them it’s not going to be easy. Some people are meant to wrestle with their sin a long time before God brings them to freedom, but let’s wrestle. Let’s fight. Let’s do something besides just complain.
In 10,000 years you will not regret anything you didn’t have or do in this life.
The best of our best, without Jesus, looks like a pile of crap compared to Him.
Discipline will never bring about love for God, but love for God will bring about discipline.