Your approval before God is woven into the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, not what other men and women think about you.

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.

God is awesome; he doesn’t need you to be awesome. He wants you to be obedient.

You and I are stymied in our own creativity. We can only create as sub-creators, and even then our best work is only sub-creation.

Comfort is the god of our generation, so suffering is seen as a problem to be solved, and not a providence from God.

The miracles of Jesus are signs of the right order of things. Jesus was not so much turning things upside down as turning them rightside up or, at least, giving his followers glimpses of the rightside up. The miracles of healing, deliverance, provision, and resurrection all reveal that God, through Jesus, is making all things new, that he is restoring what once was unbroken.

Everybody knows something's broken in the world. But illogically, foolishly, we are looking for fixes from broken people with broken ideas in broken places.