Suffering is unbearable if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you.
But resurrection is not just consolation – it is restoration. We get it all back – the love, the loved ones, the goods, the beauties of this life – but in new, unimaginable degrees of glory and joy and strength.
Suffering is actually at the heart of the Christian story.
Jesus’s miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.
The best people often have terrible lives. Job is one example, and Jesus – the ultimate ‘Job,’ the only truly, fully innocent sufferer – is another.
The life of faith is not the perfect life; it is the life which clings on to what God has said he will do.
God so loved us and hates suffering that he was willing to come down and get involved in it.
We are saved by a man who died loving his enemies.
Proper wedding vows are more a promise of mutually binding future love than a declaration of your present love.
The primary means-of-reviva l that everyone agrees upon is extraordinary prayer.
We must go back again and again to the Gospel of Christ crucified, so that our hearts are more deeply gripped by the reality of what He did and who we are in Him.
You are a totally loved moral failure.
The goal of prayer is not just the sharing of our ideas, but also of ourselves.
Religious people find God useful. Gospel people find him beautiful.
Disordered love always leads to misery and breakdown. The only way to ‘reorder’ our loves is to love God supremely.
Whatever you base your life on – you have to live up to that. Jesus is the one Lord you can live for who already died for you.
We only fully grasp the gospel when we understand, as Paul did, that we are the worst sinner we know.
Prayer is a recognition of the greatness of our God.
The gospel is not just the A-B-C’s but the A-Z of Christianity. The gospel is not just the minimum required doctrine necessary to enter the kingdom, but the way we make all progress in the kingdom.
Freedom is not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.