God's love is so extravagant and so inexplicable that he loved us before we were us. He loved us before we existed. He knew many of us would reject him, hate him, curse him, rebel against him. Yet he chose to love us. God loves us because he is love.

I think people would be surprised to discover that their challenges and struggles are not too dissimilar to us, average ordinary people. We're all looking for essentially the same thing and I think that's faith and hope and love and meaning and of course satisfaction, peace, joy.

Don't allow the opinions of other people to shape your concept of him. Get to know him yourself, and let the goodness of God change you from the inside out.

That’s how we often react when grace comes at us. It’s awkward. God offers us something that’s too good to be true—unearned, unmerited, total forgiveness—and we stand there, stiff and uncomfortable, waiting for the embrace to stop so we can get back to the business of earning our way into heaven. We need to embrace grace. We need to learn how to hug back.

Christianity is not about not swearing. It’s not about not having impure thoughts. Really, it’s not about not at all. Christianity is about Jesus.

What an opportunity we have to be a community....A community where there are models.

We need to abandon our scale and adopt God's because our misguided labels keep us from the right kind of interaction with people.