People who know they are not good make the best messengers of grace because they are desperately aware of their own need for it.

Grace always runs downhill, meeting us at the bottom, not the top.

The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit.

The gospel is not about a lifestyle that we live, it's about the law-fulfilling life that Christ lived.

I've got three kids. I worry about them but the gospel freed me and freed my wife. We are not trying to make our kids think that we're super spiritual or we've got it all together. They see mom and dad being real people. What they hear dad talking about at home is not different from what they see from dad [at church]. That won't guarantee that they'll avoid the whole PK, MK thing. But we are hopefully not contributing to what normally produces that crisis, which is pretending.

Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult not to put conditions on grace.

The Gospel is not ultimately a defense from pain, it is the message of God's rescue through pain. In fact, it allows us to drop our defenses, to escape not from pain but from the prison of "How" and "Why" to the freedom of "Who?"