I was a surfer so I hung out with people who were surfers and made fun of people who weren't surfers and I listened to surf music and made fun of people who didn't listen to surfer music.

Submitting self to God is the only real freedom-because the deepest slavery is self-dependence, self-reliance. When you live your life believing that everything (family, finances, relationships, career) depends primarily on you, you're enslaved to your strengths and weaknesses. You're trying to be your own savior. Freedom comes when we start trusting in God's abilities and wisdom instead of our own. Real life begins when we transfer our trust from our own efforts to the efforts of Christ.

Our default faith mode is to trust, above all things, our own ability to create a safe, controllable, predictable world.

Jesus has done everything for you.

When God saved me, He gave me a thirst to learn and to read and to study. I thrived in college. I got a bachelor's degree in philosophy and then went to Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.

The lifeblood of Christianity is not our persistence in moving toward God but God's persistence in moving toward us.

Because Jesus came to secure for us what we could never secure for ourselves, life doesn't have to be a tireless effort to establish ourselves, justify ourselves, validate ourselves.