Death is the prerequisite to resurrection, the new life God intends.

When I teach the formal curriculum, I have the chance to think about it ahead of time. I can rehearse it. I can illustrate it with self-deprecating humor and humble-sounding personal disclosure. I can try to make it comes out just right.

Jesus viewed his own destiny - to be glorified in and through death - as an expression of a kind of cosmic principle: the pathway to life runs through death.

Some leaders are not intimidated by opposition; they actually thrive on it. It wakes them up. It energizes them. It calls them to battle. It causes them to mobilize their thoughts and energy.

Being deeply contented with God in my everyday life is a focused attitude. It is always available. It means practicing letting go of my obsession with how I'm doing. It means training myself to learn to actually be present with people, and seeking to love them.

As much as we complain about it, though, there's part of us that is drawn to a hurried life. It makes us feel important. It keeps the adrenaline pumping. It means I don't have to look too closely at my heart or life. It keeps us from feeling our loneliness.

Sin is very important to the soul because sin is what disintegrates the soul; it's what attacks the soul. Sin kind of is to the soul what cancer is to the body.

Prudence is not the same thing as caution. Caution is a helpful strategy when you're crossing a minefield; it's a disaster when you're in a gold rush.

Authority can be faked. That's why impersonating a police officer is a crime. Sometimes the outward appearances of authority can be deceiving.

Better to be a loving person without knowing how you got there, than an expert no one can stand to be around.

This much I have learned: human beings come with very different sets of wiring, different interests, different temperaments, different learning styles, different gifts, different temptations. These differences are tremendously important in the spiritual formation of human beings.

We call an obsession with having someone's approval 'co-dependency;' the Bible's word for it is idolatry. A country can be an idol. A family can be an idol.

A bad sermon is like a car wreck - everyone slows down to see what happened.

At the heart of Christian faith is the story of Jesus' death and resurrection.

When preaching is done right, it can change lives. When it's done badly, my failure goes beyond the merely human.

The most important criterion is this: hire someone whose character and humility and attitude you would like to have reproduced in your church and in yourself.

I need an inspiration that is grounded in reality while thoroughly transcendent.

When people feel they're getting to speak into what's being preached, there is high built-in motivation to participate.

Opposition is an inevitable reality of pastoral life.

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.