Life minus love equals zero.
The best use of life is love. The best expression of love is time. The best time to love is now.
Life is a series of problem-solving opportunities. The problems you face will either defeat you or develop you depending on how you respond to them.
There is no growth without change, no change without fear or loss and no loss without pain.
The way God teaches us to live by faith is He takes away our feelings.
Nothing works perfectly. The weather doesn’t work perfectly. Because of sin in the world, nothing works perfectly. But in spite of that we can find comfort. We can find strength.
The key is really just saying my brain isn’t big enough to figure out why everything happens. It would be like an ant trying to understand the internet.
The Constitution does not guarantee freedom of worship. It guarantees freedom of religion. And this is what I call America’s first freedom.
There’s a difference between freedom of worship and freedom of religion. Worship is an event that happens inside the house of worship. Religion is a lifestyle. It is a way of living.
I don’t care whether you’re Baptist, Buddhist, Mormon, Methodist, Jewish, Muslim, or no religion at all. Jesus Christ still loves you. You still matter to God.
I believe Jesus Christ came for everybody. I don’t think he came for Christians. The Bible says take this good news to the whole world.
Christmas is the time for celebration, so I’m not against decorating, putting on lights, buying gifts. In fact, the whole reason we give gifts is the wise men gave gifts to Jesus at the first Christmas, and that started the gift-giving process.
I absolutely believe that people should show respect to everybody, regardless of their lifestyle, regardless of their beliefs, religious beliefs or any other kind of belief.
Resentment always hurts you more than it does the person you resent. While your offender has probably forgotten the offense and gone on with life, you continue to stew in your pain, perpetuating the past. Listen: those who hurt you in the past cannot continue to hurt you now unless you hold on to the pain through resentment. Your past is past! Nothing will change it. You are only hurting yourself with your bitterness. For your own sake, learn from it, and then let it go.
The search for the purpose of life has puzzled people for thousands of years. That’s because we typically begin at the wrong starting point – ourselves. We ask self-centered questions like What do I want to be? What should I do with my life? What are my goals, my ambitions, my dreams for my future? But focusing on ourselves will never reveal our life’s purpose.
The New testament commanded to love each other, pray for each other, encourage each other, admonish each other, greet each other, serve each other, teach each other, accept each other, honor each other, bear each other’s burdens, forgive each other, submit to each other, be devoted each other, and many other mutual tasks. This is biblical membership!
When you think about a problem over and over in your mind, that’s called worry. When you think about God’s Word over and over in your mind, that’s meditation. If you know how to worry, you already know how to meditate!
You didn’t create yourself, so there is no way you can tell yourself what you were created for! If I handed you an invention you had never seen before, you wouldn’t know it’s purpose, and the invention itself wouldn’t be able to tell you either. Only the creator or the owner’s manual could reveal it’s purpose.
But God’s presence in your life has nothing to do with your feelings. Your emotions are susceptible to all kinds of influences, so they are often unreliable. Sometimes the worst advice you can get is “Do what you feel.” Often what we feel is neither real nor right. Your emotional state can be the result of memories, hormones, medicines, food, lack of sleep, tension, or fears. Whenever I start to feel anxious about a situation, I remind myself that fear is often False Evidence Appearing Real.
You cannot arrive at your life’s purpose by starting with a focus on yourself. You must begin with God, your Creator. You exist only because God wills that you exist. You were made by God and for God – and until you understand that, life will never make sense. It is only in God that we discover our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our significance, and our destiny. Every other path leads to a dead end.