Prayer does two things. It shows the complete sufficiency of God and the complete helplessness of man. It shows that God is not lacking, that He is in need of no thing, that He is infinitely and gloriously wealthy, that He can give to, He can bless and He can answer without the need of help from anyone or anything else. And it also shows that we are in desperate need of that kind of sufficiency.

Could it not be, that God loves me too deeply, by having people challenge me so that I know I'm not perfect.

Men of God are those who walk in the fear of the Lord.

God ultimately raises up leaders for one primary reason: His glory. He shows His power in our weakness. He demonstrates His wisdom in our folly. We are all like a turtle on a fence post. If you walk by a fence post and see a turtle on top of it, then you know someone came by and put it there. In the same way, God gives leadership according to His good pleasure.

The great message that we call the gospel begins, then, not with us, or our need, or even the meeting of that need, but with the writer of the news and the sender of its heralds: God himself.

When I think about sanctification, a couple things immediately pop into my head. One is how slow it actually is. I think everybody wants the silver-bullet, the thing that makes sanctification move like a superhighway rather than the dirt path that it is. The other is that, by in large, the greatest single asset in ongoing sanctification is a serious pursuit of joy in the face of Jesus Christ.

I have always deeply desired to be an honest man who said it when I struggled, stumbled and worried. I longed to be a man with real friends - friends who knew me at my worst and loved me.