Bad evangelism says: I’m right, you’re wrong, and I would love to tell you about it.
To love our success more than God and our neighbor hardens the heart, making us less able to feel and to sense.
Those who understand the gospel cannot possibly look down on anyone, since they were saved by sheer grace, not by their perfect doctrine or strong moral character.
Jesus came into this world not as a philosopher or a general but as a carpenter. All work matters to God.
Two things we want so desperately, glory and relationship, can coexist only in God.
The gospel shows a God far more holy than the legalist can bear, yet far more merciful than a humanist can conceive.
God loves you just because He loves you.
When Job was prospering, he prayed. When he was suffering, he still prayed.
If we give God things in hope that they’ll earn us blessings, we’re really not doing anything for him. It’s for ourselves.
Jesus is the ultimate Job, the only truly innocent sufferer.
Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope.
The world is a dark place, and yet the coming of Jesus Christ shows us no one and nothing is hopeless.
Your heart is smothering under your small ambitions.
Our Christian hope is that we are going to live with Christ in a new earth, where there is not only no more death, but where life is what it was always meant to be.
The world says you are loved because of what you do. Jesus says you can now do all things because you are loved.
The more you see your own flaws and sins, the more precious, electrifying, and amazing God’s grace appears to you.
If you’re avoiding sin and living morally so that God will have to bless you and save you, then you may be looking to Jesus as a teacher, model, and helper, but ironically you are avoiding him as Savior. You are trusting in your own goodness rather than in Jesus for your standing with God.
Like a surgeon, friends cut you in order to heal you.
Hell is having to execute a pointless act from which nothing ever comes except the need to do it again.
Christ literally walked in our shoes and entered into our affliction. Those who will not help others until they are destitute reveal that Christ’s love has not yet turned them into the sympathetic persons the gospel should make them.