Only if you first seek inner forgiveness will your confrontation be temperate, wise, and gracious. Only when you have lost the need to see the other person hurt will you have any chance of actually bringing about change, reconciliation, and healing. You have to submit to the costly suffering and death of forgiveness if there is going to be any resurrection.

Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life.

There's nothing that makes you more miserable (or less interesting) than self-absorption .

We get angry when we feel like God owes us a better life than we have.

But resurrection is not just consolation — it is restoration. We get it all back — the love, the loved ones, the goods, the beauties of this life — but in new, unimaginable degrees of glory and joy and strength.

The essence of Christian obedience is not do’s and don’ts but personal allegiance to Jesus.

What the heart most wants, the mind finds reasonable, the will finds doable, and the emotions find desirable.