Jesus is not your accuser. He’s not your prosecutor. He’s not your judge. He’s your friend and your rescuer. Like Zacchaeus, just spend time with Jesus. Don’t hide from him in shame or reject him in self-righteousness. Don’t allow the opinions of other people to shape your concept of him. Get to know him for yourself, and let the goodness of God change you from the inside out.

When you look in the eyes of grace, when you meet grace, when you embrace grace, when you see the nail prints in grace’s hands and the fire in his eyes, when you feel his relentless love for you - it will not motivate you to sin. It will motivate you to righteousness.

You don’t have to be good to be Jesus’s friend. You just have to be honest.

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

It is absolutely essential to have a living visible example of what a Christian ought to be.

Sometimes we get way too fixated on how powerful sin is and how weak we are. We worry that if we relax for a second, we'll mess up royally and ruin everything. Ironically, our paranoia only serves to make us more conscious of our sinfulness.

It’s interesting how people try to redefine God to their liking. They bring him down to their level so they can understand him, then they reject him because he is too much like them.