Quote collection
581 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it."
"God's grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver. From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No one who is seriously wronged can “just forgive” the perpetrator."
"To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us."
"The more you understand how your salvation isn't about your behavior, the more radically your behavior will change."
"Religion: 'My identity is built on being a good person.' Gospel: 'My identity is not built on my record or my performance but on Christ's.'"
"Worry is not believing God will get it right, and bitterness is believing God got it wrong."
"Love is the effort and desire to make someone else everything they were created to be."
"Secularism and Religion are both all about your personal performance. The Gospel is the performance of another applied to you."
"Many times people think if God has called you to something, he's promising you success. He might be calling you to fail to prepare you for something else through the failure."
"It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you."
"Christianity teaches that, contra fatalism, suffering is overwhelming; contra Buddhism, suffering is real; contra karma, suffering is often unfair; but contra secularism, suffering is meaningful. There is a purpose to it, and if faced rightly, it can drive us like a nail deep into the love of God and into more stability and spiritual power than you can imagine."
"Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints."
"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."
"Religion says earn your life. Secular society says create your life. Jesus says, 'My life for your life."
"We instinctively tend to limit for whom we exert ourselves. We do it for people like us, and for people whom we like. Jesus will have none of that. By depicting a Samaritan helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all in need - regardless of race, politics, class, and religion - is your neighbour. Not everyone is your brother or sister in faith, but everyone is your neighbour, and you must love your neighbour."
"I am going to judge my circumstances by Jesus’ love, not Jesus’ love by my circumstances."
"If you love anything in this world more than God, you will crush that object under the weight of your expectations."
"...the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less."
"Some suffering is given in order to chastise and correct a person for wrongful patterns of life (as in the case of Jonah imperiled by the storm), some suffering is given not to correct past wrongs but to prevent future ones (as in the case of Joseph sold into slavery), and some suffering has no purpose other than to lead a person to love God more ardently for himself alone and so discover the ultimate peace and freedom."