It's better to have the faith to embrace reality with all its pain than to cling to the false comfort of a painless fantasy.

In reality, each thought we have carries with it a little spiritual power, a tug toward or away from God. No thought is purely neutral.

God is never a God of discouragement. When you have a discouraging spirit or train of thought in your mind, you can be sure it is not from God. He sometimes brings pain to his children-conviction over sin, or repentance over fallenness, or challenges that scare us, or visions of his holiness that overwhelm us. But God never brings discouragement.

Spiritual transformation is not a matter of trying harder, but of training wisely.

The life of Abraham Lincoln is by most accounts an amazing study in character formation. Yet he was notoriously disorganized; he even had a file in his law office labeled If you can't find it anywhere else, try looking here.

The church is in the hope business.

When I teach the formal curriculum, I have the chance to think about it ahead of time. I can rehearse it. I can illustrate it with self-deprecating humor and humble-sounding personal disclosure. I can try to make it comes out just right.