As long as I hold tightly to something, I believe I own it. But when I give it away, I relinquish control, power, and prestige. When I realize that God has a claim not merely on the few dollars I might choose to throw in an offering plate, not simply on 10 percent or even 50 percent, but on 100 percent of "my" money, it's revolutionary. If I'm God's money manager, I'm not God. Money isn't God. God is God. So God, money, and I are each put in our rightful place.

This is one of the great paradoxes of suffering. Those who don't suffer much think suffering should keep people from God, while many who suffer a great deal turn to God, not from him.

Is It Unloving to Speak of Hell? If you were giving some friends directions to Denver and you knew that one road led there but a second road ended at a sharp cliff around a blind corner, would you talk only about the safe road? No. You would tell them about both, especially if you knew that the road to destruction was wider and more traveled. In fact, it would be terribly unloving not to warn them about that other road.

God doesn't look at just what we give. He also looks at what we keep.

Whenever I see an unmarried woman carrying a child, my first response is one of respect. I know she could have taken the quick fix without anyone knowing, but she chose instead to let an innocent child live.

To procrastinate obedience is to disobey God.

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.