I'm accepted by God and it has nothing to do with me.

Discipline will never bring about love for God, but love for God will bring about discipline.

When you blow it, God still celebrates His Son in you. The litmus test of whether or not you understand the gospel is what you do when you fail. Do you run from Him and go clean yourself up a little bit before you come back into the throne room? Or do you approach the throne of grace with confidence? If you don't approach the throne of grace with confidence, you don't understand the gospel.

Stop going to church everywhere and start belonging to church somewhere.

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.

God is at work in the mess. That's the message of the Bible. That's why the Bible is not pretty. That's why it's grimy, because God is working in the mess. He's working in the tears.

The heart of our problem is the problem of our hearts.