Quote collection
581 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The early church was strikingly different from the culture around it in this way - the pagan society was stingy with its money and promiscuous with its body. A pagan gave nobody their money and practically gave everybody their body. And the Christians came along and gave practically nobody their body and they gave practically everybody their money."
"We do not have to make ourselves suffer in order to merit forgiveness. We simply receive the forgiveness earned by Christ. 1 John 1:9 says that God forgives us because He is ‘just.’ That is a remarkable statement. It would be unjust of God to ever deny us forgiveness, because Jesus earned our acceptance! In religion we earn our forgiveness with our repentance, but in the gospel we just receive it."
"Faith journeys are never simply intellectual exercises."
"An idol is something that we look to for things that only God can give. Idolatry functions widely inside religious communities when doctrinal truth is elevated to the position of a false god. This occurs when people rely on the rightness of their doctrine for their standing with God rather than on God himself and his grace. It is a subtly but deadly mistake. The sign that you have slipped into this form of self-justification is that you become what the book of Proverbs calls a 'scoffer'."
"The greatness of prayer is nothing but an extension of the greatness and glory of God in our lives To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule - it is a failure to treat God as God. It is a sin against his glory"
"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' purpose is not to warm our hearts but to shatter our categories."
"It's important to remember the Gospel is a story; not a set of bullet points."
"The common moral framework: Do anything as long as it does no harm to others. Problem: Whose definition of harm?"
"God loves you just because He loves you."
"Your feelings come from where you find your hope. Where is your happiness and your significance?"
"All forms of love are necessary, and none are to be ignored, but all of us find some forms of love to be more emotionally valuable to us. They are a currency that we find particularly precious, a language that delivers the message of love to our hearts with the most power. Some types of love are more thrilling and fulfilling to us when we receive them."
"Just because we don't see a reason for evil and suffering doesn't mean there's not a reason for it."
"Nothing we formulate or do can qualify us for access to God. Only grace can do that- based not on our performance but on the saving work of Christ."
"Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life."
"The doctrine of grace and redemption keeps us from seeing any person or situation as hopeless."
"While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy."
"The best people often have terrible lives. Job is one example, and Jesus—the ultimate ‘Job,’ the only truly, fully innocent sufferer — is another."
"Because of the Cross, God can be both just towards sin and yet mercifully justifying to sinners."
"The church is often like a football stadium where 22 people need a rest and thousands of people need exercise."