Actually, my character needs to be questioned. On a regular basis. By people who know and love me.

The single dynamic that helps people be most aware of God and most experiencing the fruit of the Spirit is gratitude.

Jesus is why women have traveled continents, spent decades learning a strange language so they could translate the Gospel, planting churches, caring for the sick, educating the illiterate, and marching for the oppressed.

I know that those of us who go into church work are to regard ourselves as servants, are to offer our lives as a gift.

Far more books get written about how to get more people in your church than how to get the people already in your church to have more humility and sincere love.

In the context of worship, amusement is a waste of time and a waste of life, and therefore a form of sin.

Jesus' life as a foot-washing servant would eventually lead to the adoption of humility as a widely admired virtue.

Churches need to figure out how they will address the spiritual lives of their staffs and leadership teams.

There are usually multiple messages that could be preached from the same text.

Sometimes in churches somebody will discover a particular vein of spirituality and seek to recruit others into it, or assume a superior position because they have found certain techniques - but no one actually wants to become like them.

Although the church has often been far too slow to follow his lead, Jesus' insistence that women, as well as men, bear the full image of God has had a way of sparking reform movements across the centuries.

As a preacher who is fully human, and clearly not divine, I can't speak as Jesus did. But I do seek to speak truth that carries weight and authority. All of us who preach the gospel aspire to speak under the authority of Jesus.

I'm not sure ministry can ever have the urgency it requires if it is not aware of evil, both externally and internally.

When someone is in crisis, don't start by teaching, leveraging, or explaining. Just be with.

When the soul is understood and attended to, we can be liberated from hurry, preoccupation, unsatisfied desires, and chronic discontent.

The irony is that 'looking down on everybody else' is a violation of the law of love, which, according to Jesus, is the absolute essence of righteousness.

It strikes me that presidential campaigns can often bring out the worst as well as the best in us.

Tithing is a bad ceiling but an excellent floor.

Those of us who preach the Scriptures, along with being nourished by it ourselves, have to figure out along with our congregations how we can incarnate the gospel in our community, or we will preach to a religious ghetto.

Sometimes, an inability to believe in Satan reflects a larger inability to believe in a spiritual plane at all.

There are dozens of references to God in the Scriptures for every one to the figure of Satan. This reflects a sometimes forgotten theological truth that the devil is by no means God's counterpart. He is a creature, not the Creator.

I hate how spiritual formation gets positioned as an optional pursuit for a small special interest group within the church.

We do not need answers or formulas to minister in crisis.

Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.

Evil exists. Evil is real. One of the hallmarks of evil is that it seeks to convince its victims that it exists 'out there.'

The toppling of idols - even respectable, admired, best-practice, fastest-growing idols - is always the road to liberation.

What influences our behavior, and what our level of responsibility is, are very complex issues. And anytime we try to make this simplistic, we don't serve people well.

People with the strongest and healthiest sense of calling are not obsessed with their calling. They are preoccupied with the Caller.

'Amusement' is appealing because we don't have to think; it spares us the fear and anxiety that might otherwise prey on our thoughts.

I am a political junkie. During a presidential campaign, I will often buy a couple of newspapers a day just to keep up.

I have always heard that you need to give yourself a long time to unplug when you do a sabbatical. I unplugged so fast I was a little concerned that I was losing brain capacity.

We all want to feel spiritually vigorous, and we hurt when we don't. This pain is intensified for people who lead church ministries.

Pastors have historically understood their primary battle to be not the battle to build a big church, but the battle against the power of sin.

Spiritual formation is for everyone. Just as there is an 'outer you' that is being formed and shaped all the time, like it or not, by accident or on purpose, so there is an 'inner you.' You have a spirit.

As a preacher, my charge is to proclaim the message of the Scriptures. To help the people in my congregation become a people of the book. I love getting to do this.

Tithing is like training wheels when it comes to giving. It's intended to help you get started, but not recommended for the Tour de France.

My wife is one of the most extroverted people I know. She could out-talk Oprah and Joyce Meyer simultaneously.

Jesus had a universal concern for those who suffered that transcended the rules of the ancient world.

Women are the first witnesses to the resurrection and pillars of the early church.

To have my mind racing and my heart beating fast over glorious possibilities is very close to the summit of life experience for me.

Love of learning led to monasteries, which became the cradle of academic guilds.

There are no clear boundary lines between what is physiological, what is psychological, and what is spiritual. Those are language domains that make sense and have integrity but overlap significantly.

I am struck by how quickly I am prone to judgmentalism.

Amusement is a way of boredom-avoidance through external stimulation that fails to exercise our minds. It's mere diversion.

Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.

Tithing is considerably less popular than words like generosity or sharing.

In community, we discover who we really are and how much transformation we still require. This is why I am irrevocably committed to small groups. Through them, we can accomplish our God-entrusted work to transform human beings.

A healthy soul is whole and integrated. It is connected to God. A person with a healthy soul is at peace with God, with himself, and with other people.

The only true and lasting inspiration for life is genuine love for God, and submitted gratitude that I get to be a part of the redemptive quest.

'Who Is This Man?' is about the impact of Jesus on human history. Most people - including most Christians - simply have no idea of the extent to which we live in a Jesus-impacted world.