When we depend on anything smaller than God to provide us with the security, significance, meaning, and value that we long for, God will love us enough to take it away. Much of our anger and bitterness, therefore, is God prying open our hands and taking away something we've held onto more tightly than him.

When you don't know where you fit inside the home and you're young and you're desperate to fit in somewhere, I'd figured where I would fit outside the home. So I made some obviously bad decisions about who I hung out with and the things that I did.

My struggle isn't believing my performance can earn God's favor; my struggle is believing my performance can keep God's favor

The gospel doesn't make bad people good, it makes dead people alive.

The law demands that we do it all; the gospel declares that Jesus paid it all.

In those moments when I'm obsessively counting my sins against me, it is good news to remember that God has counted my sins against Christ.

Grace is thickly counter-intuitive. It feels risky and unfair. It's dangerous and disorderly. It wrestles control out of our hands. It is wild and unsettling. It turns everything that makes sense to us upside-down and inside-out.