Our prayers should arise out of immersion in the Scripture. [We] speak only to the degree we are spoken to.

In a smaller church your pastoring sets up your preaching. In a larger church your preaching sets up your pastoring.

The purpose of Jesus's coming is to put the whole world right, to renew and restore the creation, not to escape it.

While Christianity was able to agree with pagan writers that inordinate attachment to earthly goods can lead to unnecessary pain and grief, it also taught that the answer to this was not to love things less but to love God more than anything else. Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope.

If we say, 'I believe in Jesus,' but it doesn't affect the way we live, the answer is not that now we need to add hard work to our faith so much as that we haven't truly understood or believed in Jesus at all.

[T]he main problem in life is sin, and the only solution is God and his grace. The alternative to this view is to identify something besides sin as the main problem with the world and something besides God as the main remedy. That demonizes something that is not completely bad, and makes an idol out of something that cannot be the ultimate good.

The world is polarizing over religion. It is getting both more religious and less religious at the same time.