I wish I could say that everything I do is for God’s glory but I can’t. And neither can you. What I can say is Jesus’ blood covers all my efforts to glorify myself.

When I was 25, I believed I could change the world. At 41, I have come to the realization that I cannot change my wife, my church, or my kids, to say nothing of the world. Try as I might, I have not been able to manufacture outcomes the way I thought I could, either in my own life or other people's.

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.

The gospel doesn't just free me from what people think of me, but also from what I think of me.

There's absolutely no way you can feel the freedom to embarrass and humiliate yourself unless you have finally recognized that your identity is in someone other than yourself.

Only the gospel can truly save you. The gospel doesn't make bad people good; it makes dead people alive...the gospel is God's acceptance of us based on what Christ has done, not on what we can do.

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