For many people, God is primitive, behind, trying to drag everything back to some prehistoric era as opposed to spirit, force, love, drawing us into a better future, which to me is - that story has done something in me and I've seen it do things in other people.

Questions are not scary. What is scary is when people don’t have any. What is tragic is faith that has no room for them.

Hope. People want hope. We crave hope. We long for hope. Hope has been present since the very beginning. And almost in the worst situations of human history, you often find the greatest amount of hope. The very nature of the situation, the way stepped-on people created within them even more hope than when things were going fine. Hope has always been around.

For a lot of people in our world today, God has become about believing the right stuff so you don't get in trouble.

If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody.

Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does

Some communities don't permit open, honest inquiry about the things that matter most. Lots of people have voiced a concern, expressed a doubt, or raised a question, only to be told by their family, church, friends, or tribe: "We don't discuss those things here." I believe the discussion itself is divine. Abraham does his best to bargain with God, most of the book of Job consists of arguments by Job and his friends about the deepest questions of human suffering, God is practically on trial in the book of Lamentations, and Jesus responds to almost every question he's asked with...a question.