The thought of building a life around minimal morality or minimal significance—a life defined by the question, “What is permissible?”—felt almost disgusting to me. I didn’t want a minimal life. I didn’t want to live on the outskirts of reality. I wanted to understand the main thing about life and pursue it.

Be glad in the Lord and receive willingly from His Hand all that he designs for my holiness - both painful and pleasant.

Homosexual behavior has been exploited, and reveled in, and celebrated in art, for millennia.

The Bible is the ultimate authority and infallible, not the pastor and not the elders. And it doesn't mean that you believe everything he says without examining it.

Not to abide in Jesus’ love would mean that we stop believing that we are loved by Jesus. We look at our circumstances - perhaps persecution or disease or abandonment - and we conclude that we are not loved by Jesus anymore. That’s the opposite of abiding in the love of Jesus. So abiding in his love means continuing to believe, moment by moment, that we are loved.

Pastors and missionaries (need) to know God and to find in him a Treasure more satisfying than any other person or thing or relationship or experience or accomplishment in the world.

Out of the freedom from worry that God's generosity provides comes an impulse toward simplicity rather than accumulation.