One of the reasons I'm an interesting person to be married to is my intensely late-blooming self-awareness.
In community, we discover who we really are and how much transformation we still require. This is why I am irrevocably committed to small groups. Through them, we can accomplish our God-entrusted work to transform human beings.
I hate how hard spiritual transformation is and how long it takes. I hate thinking about how many people have gone to church for decades and remain joyless or judgmental or bitter or superior.
To have my mind racing and my heart beating fast over glorious possibilities is very close to the summit of life experience for me.
Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.
Some leaders are not intimidated by opposition; they actually thrive on it. It wakes them up. It energizes them. It calls them to battle. It causes them to mobilize their thoughts and energy.
Politics, after all, is largely about power. And power goes to the core of our issues of control and narcissism and need to be right and tendency to divide the human race into 'us' vs. 'them.'
Death is the prerequisite to resurrection, the new life God intends.
Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.
You can only love and be loved to the extent that you know and are known by somebody.
Pastors have historically understood their primary battle to be not the battle to build a big church, but the battle against the power of sin.
Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.
Women are the first witnesses to the resurrection and pillars of the early church.
When people feel they're getting to speak into what's being preached, there is high built-in motivation to participate.
There are usually multiple messages that could be preached from the same text.
When it comes to sermon writing, generally there are two problems. Some preachers love the research stage but hate the writing, and they start writing too late. Others don't like doing research, so they move way too fast to the writing part.
Congregations shaped by the Scriptures generally have preachers who are shaped by the Scriptures.
People with the strongest and healthiest sense of calling are not obsessed with their calling. They are preoccupied with the Caller.
For most of us, the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.
I am a political junkie. During a presidential campaign, I will often buy a couple of newspapers a day just to keep up.