If you love anything in this world more than God, you will crush that object under the weight of your expectations.

There are many ways to cover up our sin. We may justify or minimize it by blaming circumstances and others people. However, real repentance first admits sin as sin and takes full responsibility. True confession and repentance begins when blame shifting ends...Just as real repentance begins only where blame shifting ends, so it also begins where self-pity ends, and we start to turn from our sin out of love for God rather than mere self-interest.

If you have to run away from something that used to be an idol, you're actually still enslaved by it. It's still controlling you.

If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.

When Jesus looked down from the cross, he didn't think “I am giving myself to you because you are so attractive to me.” No, he was in agony, and he looked down at us - denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him - and in the greatest act of love in history, he STAYED. He said, “Father, forgive them, they don't know what they are doing.” He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.

Jesus's teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing , religious people of his day.

If we have not seen our sin and sought radical forgiveness from God, we will be unable to forgive and to seek the good of those who have wronged us.