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.

I was spending way too much time thinking about me and what I needed to do, and far too little time thinking about Jesus and what he had already done for me.

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.

I grew up in a remarkable home, the middle of seven children. My parents raised us well. They loved us well. We laughed hard growing up. But being the middle child, I couldn't figure out where I fit in the home, whether I was the youngest of the older three or the oldest of the younger three. 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 bad decisions about who I hung out with, I dropped out of high school, got kicked out of the house.

Only the gospel can truly save you. The gospel doesn't make good people good; it makes dead people alive. That's the difference between the gospel of Jesus Christ and every other world religion. All the others exhort their followers to save themselves by being good, by conforming their lives to whatever their worshiped deity is. But the gospel is God's acceptance of us based on what Christ has done, not on what we can do.

As long as I am focusing on the faults of others, then I don't have to face my own.

When we reduce the notion of “calling” to work inside the church, we fail to equip our people to apply their Christian faith to everything they do, everywhere they are.