I never realized how much I've become dependent on human approval until God took it away. I didn't even realize that I was in a self-made prison of human approval and human acceptance. Most of the prisons we live in we are not conscious of. God showed me Jesus plus nothing equals everything. And everything minus Jesus equals nothing. That set me free.

The gospel is for the defeated, not the dominant.

Assurance never comes from looking at ourselves. It only comes as a consequence of looking to Christ.

The Bible is one long story of God meeting our rebellion with His rescue, our sin with His salvation, our guilt with His grace, our badness with His goodness. The overwhelming focus of the Bible is not the work of the redeemed but the work of the Redeemer. Which means that the Bible is not first a recipe for Christian living but a revelation book of Jesus who is the answer to our un-Christian living.

The truth is that when it comes to suffering, if we do not go to our graves in confusion, we will not go to our graves trusting. Explanations are a substitute for trust.

Even political insiders recognize that years of political effort on behalf of Evangelical Christians have generated little cultural gain.

Between writing, traveling, speaking, preaching, and doing my best to be a good husband to my wife and my three kids, that's about as much as one man or at least this man can do.