Moralism doesn’t produce morality; it produces immorality.
Because Jesus was strong for us we are free to be weak.
Christianity is in no way a stoic faith. It fundamentally rejects the “stiff upper lip” school of thought.
The Gospel is not ultimately a defense from pain, it is the message of God’s rescue through pain. In fact, it allows us to drop our defenses, to escape not from pain but from the prison of “How” and “Why” to the freedom of “Who?”
We are all both victims and victimizers. Just as everyone suffers, no one is innocent of causing suffering themselves.
While our sin reaches far, God’s grace reaches farther. God came after us not to strip away our freedom but to strip away our slavery to self, that we could become truly free.
Jesus plus nothing equals everything; everything minus Jesus equals nothing.
The smaller you get-the smaller life makes you-the easier it is to see the grandeur of grace. While I am far more incapable than I may have initially thought, God is infinitely more capable than I ever hoped.
Grace is thickly counter-intuitive. It feels risky and unfair. It’s dangerous and disorderly. It wrestles control out of our hands. It is wild and unsettling. It turns everything that makes sense to us upside-down and inside-out.
Sometimes God has to remind you that you’re weak so that you can be set free from your “self-sufficiency.”
People who haven’t experienced major setbacks sometimes feel that their hurts are somehow less legitimate or real.
The emphasis of the Bible is on the work of the Redeemer, not on the work of the redeemed.
When we reduce the notion of “calling” to work inside the church, we fail to equip our people to apply their Christian faith to everything they do, everywhere they are.
I agree we have enough books that attempt to explain why God allows suffering, presumably in a way that lets God off the hook. And while much smarter men than I have constructed elaborate systems in this pursuit, they are by definition exercises in speculation.
God did not rescue me out of the pain, He rescued me through the pain!
Legalism breeds a sense of entitlement that turns us into complainers.
For the life of the believer, one thing is beautifully and abundantly true: God’s chief concern in your suffering is to be with you and be himself for you.
God is the one to be praised, not our transformation.
The Christian life has been nothing more and nothing less than a daily dependence on and a rediscovery of God’s grace.
The gospel doesn’t make bad people good, it makes dead people alive.