God is bigger than the Christian faith.
Something is profoundly wrong and we are desperate for justice, for restoration and for somebody somewhere to do something about this.
Many of the most significant moments in our lives come not because it all went right but because it all fell apart.
Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it.
We live in the midst of a creation that is groaning.
I am for marriage. I am for fidelity. I am for love, whether it’s a man and woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man.
Your deepest, darkest sins and your shameful secrets are simply irrelevant when it comes to the counterintuitive, ecstatic announcement of the gospel. So are your goodness, your rightness, your church attendance, and all of the wise, moral, mature decisions you have made and actions you have taken.
I feel like I’ve gotten an extraordinary opportunity to experience a sort of collective humanity. If you hug many people in such a short period of days you pick up on a communal energy, almost like feeling a giant heartbeat that everyone is beating together.
Jesus is God’s way of refusing to give up his dream for the world.
It’s absolutely crucial that we come face to face with the power of our choices.
The great German scholar Helmut Thielicke once said that a person who speaks to this hour’s need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth.
Grace is when you know you’re loved exactly as you are.
Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does.
That breath that you just took, that’s a gift!
Often times when I meet atheists and we talk about the god they don’t believe in, we quickly discover that I don’t believe in that god, either.
If anybody didn’t have a messiah complex, it was Jesus.
If it is true, if it is beautiful, if it is honorable, if it is right, then claim it. Because it is from God. And you belong to God.
The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, Me too.
If the gospel isn’t good news for everybody, then it isn’t good news for anybody.
Before anything else, you have received breath – the gift of life itself. The first word about you is GIFT.