Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two—love and controlling power over the other person—are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.

I'm very comfortable in a room with thousands of people.

The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we'll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it.

This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.

My experience as a pastor is lots of people have really toxic, dangerous, psychologically devastating images of God in their head, images of a God who's not good.

Everybody is following somebody. Everybody has faith in something and somebody. We are all believers.

To make it really clear and simple, let's call this movement across history we see in passages like the ones we just looked at from Exodus and Deuteronomy clicks. What we see is God meeting people at the click they're at, and then drawing them forward.When they're at F, God calls them to G.When we're at L, God calls us to M.And if we're way back there at A, God meets us way back there at A and does what God always does: invites us forward to B.