The idea of a spiritual heart transplant is a vivid image to me; once you have the heart of somebody else inside you, then that heart is there. Jesus' heart is inside me, and my heart is gone. So if God were to place a stethoscope against my chest, he would hear the heart of Jesus Christ beating.

Ggrace is God's best idea - it's His decision to ravage people by love, to rescue passionately, and to restore justly.

Let's try to present the same gospel but in a fresh fashion, always looking for a better way to connect with the audience.

For seven years ancient Israel could not be stopped in the Joshua book. I have found this to be a great imagery and analogy for the Christian life. As Christians, we have the same images. We've come out of Egypt (been saved) we've crossed over, and Jesus Christ is our Moses and our Joshua.

All preaching should be as creative as we can make it. We've been entrusted with such a treasure. To have anywhere from 50 to 5000 people who give us 30 minutes of their time to hear whatever we want to say - I think they deserve all the creativity that we can give.

I think what happens is that we're so busy as pastors that we never get around to trying to turn that material into a book. It's a shame because there is so much good material out there that needs to be published.

The lack of God-centeredness leads to self-centeredness.