John Ortberg

300 quotes

• God is never a God of discouragement. When you have a discouraging spirit or train of thought in your mind, you can be sure it is not from God. He sometimes brings pain to his children-conviction over sin, or repentance over fallenness, or challenges that scare us, or visions of his holiness that overwhelm us. But God never brings discouragement.

• The soul was not made to run on empty. But the soul doesn’t come with a gauge. The indicators of soul-fatigue are more subtle: Things seem to bother you more than they should. Your spouse’s gum-chewing suddenly reveals to you a massive character flaw. It’s hard to make up your mind about even a simple decision. Impulses to eat or drink or spend or crave are harder to resist than they otherwise would be. You are more likely to favor short-term gains in ways that leave you with high long-term costs. Israel ended up worshiping a golden calf simply because they grew tired of having to wait on Moses and God. Your judgment is suffering. You have less courage. “Fatigue makes cowards of us all” is a quote so ubiquitous that it has been attributed to General Patton and Vince Lombardi and Shakespeare. The same disciples who fled in fear when Jesus was crucified eventually sacrificed their lives for him. What changed was not their bodies, but their souls.

• Every day you and I walk through God's shop. Every day we brush up against objects of incalculable worth to Him. People. Every one of them carries a price tag, if only we could see it.

• Prayer, meditation, and confession actually have the power to rewire the brain in a way that can make us less self-referential and more aware of how God sees us. But these impediments to sin may not come easily.

• Too often, people who need the cheers the most get them the least. Every day, everyone you know faces life with eternity on the line, and life has a way of beating people down. Every life needs a cheering section. Every life needs a shoulder to lean on once in a while. Every life needs a prayer to lift them up to God. Every life needs a hugger to wrap some arms around them sometimes. Every life needs to hear a voice saying, “Don’t give up.

• The paradox of soul-satisfaction is this: When I die to myself, my soul comes alive. God says the wrong approach to soul thirst is through human achievement and material wealth. So soul-satisfaction is not about acquiring the right things but about acquiring the right soul. It is not something you buy, but something you receive freely from God. Hear these great words of the prophet Isaiah: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and [your soul] will delight in the richest of fare.” And it will be satisfied.

• Gratitude does not always come naturally. You will not always feel grateful. But you can take the time each day to remember the benefits you received, see your benefactor, and thank him for his benefits. As Thornton Wilder put it, “We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

• Our soul begins to grow in God when we acknowledge our basic neediness.

• The Spirit never just flows in us; he always flows through us so that others might flourish as well.

• My main job is to remain connected to God. When my primary focus is being present with him, everything else has a way of falling into place.

• Being rich towards God means... growing a soul that is increasingly healthy and good... loving and enjoying the people around you... learning about your gifts and passion and doing good work to improve the world... becoming generous with your stuff... making that which is temporary become the servant of that which is eternal ...savoring every roll of the dice and every trip around the board.

• Spiritual greatness has nothing to do with being greater than others. It has everything to do with being as great as each of us can be.

• The world diverts my soul-attention when it encourages me to think of myself more as a victim than as a human. I am so wrapped up in the hurt I have received that I do not notice the hurt I inflict.

• To speak about depth means that there is more going on than what we see on the surface. To love deeply or care deeply or value deeply means we have devoted time and effort and thought. To suffer deeply means to be wounded at the soul level. “Depth” is an expression of spiritual vastness.

• Real life, however, begins when I die to the false god that is me.

• Your soul connects your thoughts and your sensations and your gratitude and your will and sends a message to your entire being. You can send that message to other persons; you can send it to God.

• Dallas pointed out to me once that there is a world of difference between being busy and being hurried. Being busy is an outward condition, a condition of the body. It occurs when we have many things to do. Busy-ness is inevitable in modern culture. If you are alive today in North America, you are a busy person. There are limits to how much busy-ness we can tolerate, so we wisely find ways to slow down whenever we can. We take vacations, we sit in a La-Z-Boy® with a good book, we enjoy a leisurely meal with friends. By itself, busy-ness is not lethal. Being hurried is an inner condition, a condition of the soul. It means to be so preoccupied with myself and my life that I am unable to be fully present with God, with myself, and with other people. I am unable to occupy this present moment. Busy-ness migrates to hurry when we let it squeeze God out of our lives. Note the differences between the two: Busy Hurried A full schedule Preoccupied Many activities Unable to be fully present An outward condition An inner condition of the soul Physically demanding Spiritually draining Reminds me I need God Causes me to be unavailable to God I cannot live in the kingdom of God with a hurried soul. I cannot rest in God with a hurried soul.

• I put all my hope in a third day God. But I live in a second-day world.

• deliberately look for God in the ordinary moments of everyday life.

• Superficiality,” said Richard Foster, “is the curse of our age.” The desperate need of the soul is not for intelligence, nor talent, nor yet excitement; just depth.

• Sin is not just the wrong stuff we do; it’s the good we don’t do. It’s the starving children we don’t want to look at, the volunteering we avoid, the poor we don’t want to serve, and the money we don’t want to give.

• Don’t wait for passion to lead you somewhere you’re not. Start by bringing passion to the place where you are.

• sacred pathways Naturalist... finds God in nature Ascetic... is drawn to disciplines Traditionalist... loves historical liturgies Activist... comes alive spiritually in a great cause Caregiver... meets God in serving Sensate... senses God through five senses Enthusiast... loves to grow through people Contemplative... is drawn to solitary reflection and prayer Intellectual... loves God by learning.

• faithfulness tends to elicit trust.

• The time to love is now. When we love, we enter into the mystery of eternity. Nothing offered in love is ever lost, for this mortal life is not the whole story. This life is to the next a kind of school, a kind of preparation for the me you were meant to be. That person will go into eternity.

• David is called a man after God's heart. This can be a little confusing when you get into his story, because he's guilty of adultery and murder and cover-up. He's a train wreck as a husband, and he's worse as a dad. But his heart belongs to God. His whole life is immersed in the presence and story of God. What lights him up is to serve God and love God, and when he mess up—and he does—he repents and wants to get right with God again.

• Repeatedly in the book of Leviticus, Israel is told that if people do not properly observe the Sabbath, or Passover, or if they profane what is holy, or despise the commandments, “. . . such persons must be cut off from their people.” That may seem harsh, but an unhealthy soul is like a cancer in the community. I care for my soul because if it becomes unhealthy, it will infect others.

• The soul searches for a father. Soul-damage living in a soul-changed world Consider these vignettes from people trying to survive: Success Man.

• God’s primary will for your life is that you become a magnificent person in his image, somebody with the character of Jesus. That is God’s main will for your life. No circumstance can prevent that.

• Self is a stand-alone, do-it-yourself unit, while the soul reminds us we were not made for ourselves. The soul always exists before God. So soul is needed for deep art, poetry, and music. Former opera singer Scott Flaherty said it best: “I mean, when you sing your giving voice to your soul.” Imagine singing, “Then sings my self, my Savior God to thee,” or “Jesus, lover of my self.” Innately we know that the self is not the soul, even as we do everything we can

• In other words, our willpower is easily fatigued. We can use our wills to override our habits for a few moments, but our habits will always beat willpower alone in the long run.

• “As a general rule, the harder you work to control things, the more you lose control. The harder you try to hit a fast serve in tennis, the more your muscles tense up. The harder you try to impress someone on a date or while making a sale, the more you force the conversation and come across as pushy. The harder you cling to people, the more apt they are to push you away.

• He just says, "You go. We'll work on the faith thing and the numbers thing while you're doing your obedience thing. I'm sending you out. Ready or not...

• In order to be grateful, you have to receive and recognize a gift that you believe is good.

• The way to go through one of God's open doors is with all your heart. And with all your heart means that sacrifice is involved... choosing one thing means not choosing another.

• This is foundational for understanding the notion of open doors correctly: God's primary will for you is the person you become.

• God's great, holy joke about the messiah complex is this: Every human being who has ever lived has suffered from it... except one. And he was the Messiah.

• Gratitude is the ability to experience life as a gift. It liberates us from the prison of self-preoccupation.

• A paradox of the soul is that it is incapable of satisfying itself, but it is also incapable of living without satisfaction. You were made for soul-satisfaction, but you will only ever find it in God. The soul craves to be secure. The soul craves to be loved. The soul craves to be significant, and we find these only in God in a form that can satisfy us. That’s why the psalmist says to God, “Because your love is better than life... my soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods.” Soul and appetite and satisfaction are dominant themes in the Bible... the soul craves because it is meant for God. “My soul, find rest in God.

• A soul without a center feels constantly vulnerable to people or circumstances.

• We demean people when we forget they have the depth and dignity of a soul. Even the people I don’t like have souls.

• The greatest moment of your life is now. Not because it's pleasant or happy or easy, but because this moment is the only moment you've got. Every past moment is irretrievably gone. It's never coming back. If you live there, you lose your life. And the future is always out there somewhere. You can spend an eternity waiting for tomorrow, or worrying about tomorrow. If you live there, you likewise will lose your life. This moment is God's irreplaceable gift to you.

• Being right is actually a very hard burden to be able to carry gracefully and humbly. That’s why nobody likes to sit next to the kid in class who’s right all the time. One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.

• Your Mission starts where you are, Not where you think you should be. Sometimes we're tempted to think that our current position/job/situation is a barrier to our mission, but, in fact, it is where it starts.

• If ever there were a true “just as I am” church, if ever there were a community where everybody could bring all their baggage and brokenness with them without neat and tidy happy endings quite yet, if ever there was a group where everyone was loved and no one pretended... we could not make enough room inside the building.

• The soul without a center finds its identity in externals. My temptation when my soul is not centered in God is to try to control my life. In the Bible this is spoken of in terms of the lifting up of one’s soul. The prophet Habakkuk said that the opposite of living in faithful dependence on God is to lift your soul up in pride. The psalmist says that the person who can live in God’s presence is the one who has not lifted their soul up to an idol. When my soul is not centered in God, I define myself by my accomplishments, or my physical appearance, or my title, or my important friends. When I lose these, I lose my identity.

• It may be a very bad thing that I needed God to die for me, but it is a wonderful thing that God thinks I am worth dying for.

• In the Bible, God never gives anyone an easy job. God never comes to Abraham, or Moses, or Esther and says, “I’d like you to do me a favor, but it really shouldn’t take much time. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you.” God does not recruit like someone from the PTA. He is always intrusive, demanding, exhausting. He says we should expect that the world will be hard, and that our assignments will be hard.

• A very simple way to guard your soul is to ask yourself, “Will this situation block my soul’s connection to God?” As I begin living this question I find how little power the world has over my soul. What if I don’t get a promotion, or my boss doesn’t like me, or I have financial problems, or I have a bad hair day? Yes, these may cause disappointment, but do they have any power over my soul? Can they nudge my soul from its center, which is the very heart of God? When you think about it that way, you realize that external circumstances cannot keep you from being with God. If anything, they draw you closer to him.

• We must learn to cast off our anxieties because we have so many of them. The world destroys spiritual life by generating constant anxiety. Jesus said that the life of the gospel is choked out by the cares of this world. We know this to be true yet we are more chained and tethered to the world than ever before in the human race.

• God says, “I have set before you an open door,” not “I have set before you a finished script.

• Joyful people make us come alive.

• Failure isn’t falling down; failure is refusing to try.

• The main thing you will give your congregation... just like the main thing you will give to God... is the person you become. If your soul is unhealthy, you can’t help anybody. You don’t send a doctor with pneumonia to care for patients with immune disorders. You, and nobody else, are responsible for the well-being of your own soul.

• When we reach out to God, we are lifting our souls up to be nurtured and healed. A soul centered in God always knows it has a heavenly Father who will hold its pain, its fear, its anxiety. This is spiritual life: to place the soul each moment in the presence and care of God. “My soul cleaves to you, your right hand upholds me.” It is much harder than it sounds to keep our souls centered on God. We hold on tightly, but often to the wrong things. But staying centered on God... his word, his ways... is the essence of life for the soul.

• The more you think you’re entitled to, the less you will be grateful for. The bigger the sense of entitlement, the smaller the sense of gratitude. We wonder why in our world we keep getting more and more and more and keep being less and less and less grateful.

• We should all pause occasionally to ask if we are living with that kind of generous spirit. Maybe we have an abundance of oil and flour in our jars. Maybe we only have a little. Maybe we have a huge flour jar, or perhaps a very small one. No matter what we have, we can still learn to live with a generous spirit.

• When you help other people discover their strengths, you are helping the image of God to be restored in another human being.

• In a contagious world, we learn to keep our distance. If we get too close to those who are suffering, we might get infected by their pain. It may not be convenient or comfortable. But only when you get close enough to catch their hurt will they be close enough to catch your love.

• Here’s some soul homework, by way of Dallas Willard: If you want to really experience the flow of love as never before, the next time you are in a competitive situation around work or relationship or whose kids are the highest achieving or looks or whatever, pray that the others around you will be more outstanding, more praised, and more used of God than yourself. Really pull for them and rejoice in their success. If Christians were universally to do this for each other, the earth would soon be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God.

• Jesus was often busy, but never hurried.

• learning styles Visual... learn best by seeing Auditory... learn best by hearing Tactile ... learn best by doing Oral... learn best by saying Social... learn best in groups Logical... learn best in linear process Imaginative... learn best through art, story, and image.

• Even in the world today, it is often at the point where we are frustrated by the gap between fallen reality and our sense of God’s desires that we are moved to action in a cause greater than ourselves.

• The sequence in the Bible is usually not calling; deep feeling of peace about it; decision to obey; smooth sailing. Instead, it’s usually calling; abject terror; decision to obey; big problems; more terror; second thoughts; repeat several times; deeper faith.

• Once you’re a little bit to the side, God can come to the center.

• God designed us so that our choices, our thoughts and desires, and our behavior would be in perfect harmony with each other and would be powered by an unbroken connection with God, in perfect harmony with him and with all of his creation. That is a well-ordered soul.

• There is real neurological evidence for the power of spiritual reflection to make us aware of our sin. Christians actually use a different part of their brain to self-evaluate than non-Christians. In a study conducted in Beijing, researchers compared which part of the brain people used to evaluate both themselves and others. The study is summarized in an article with the snappy title, “Neural Consequences of Religious Belief on Self-Referential Processing.” Non-religious subjects used one part of the brain (the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, in case you’re interested) to evaluate themselves, but another part (the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex) to evaluate others. Christians used the same part of the brain to evaluate themselves that they used to evaluate others. Researchers hypothesized this is because they were actually using a kind of “Jesus reference point” for self-evaluation; they were really asking, “What does God think of me?” UCLA researcher Jeff Schwartz said that this study is one of the most important scientific papers published in the last decade. Prayer, meditation, and confession actually have the power to rewire the brain in a way that can make us less self-referential and more aware of how God sees us.

• God's primary will for your life is not the achievements you accrue; it's the person you become.

• There is an immense difference between training to do something and trying to do something.

• When he had moved to New York nine years earlier, he said, his big brother Richard had tucked a note into his luggage. Ray read it, in tears, to the audience: “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?

• This is precisely why when somebody asked Jesus once, “What is the most important of all the commandments? he answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” It is not coincidental that all the parts of the person we have been talking about are here in the most important commandment. Your heart that is, your will, your choices, your mind all your thoughts and desires, your strength all of your body, and your soul are all to be bound together and focused on love of God, and then the love of all that flows out of this.

• The Honest Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone — Especially Ourselves, Ariely

• We complicate our faith and lives in many ways, but at the core, our purpose is simple: We are called to love.

• Where the faith has too much money and too much power for too long it begins to spoil,

• The ability to have anything you want actually can cost you your freedom.

• Faith is, among other things, an act of the imagination.

• True joy, as it turns out, comes only to those who have devoted their lives to something greater than personal happiness.

• If we want to follow someone, we can't go faster than the one who is leading.

• There is a cure for buyer's remorse. There is a better way to go through the door... with all your heart.

• The soul is hidden in God’s creating hand: In his hand is the soul of every living thing (Job 12:10).

• Easy is a soul word, not a circumstance word; not an assignment word. Aim at having easy circumstances, and life will be hard all around. Aim at having an easy soul, and your capacity for tackling hard assignments will actually grow. The soul was not made for an easy life. The soul was made for an easy yoke.

• ... I will never go through a "big" door if I do not humble myself to the task of discerning and entering all the small ones.

• A lot of people are dissatisfied with their jobs. “Theologian” Drew Carey said, “You hate your job? There’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody. They meet at the bar.” A research group affiliated with the University of Chicago recently listed the ten least happy jobs in the world and the ten happiest jobs in the world. What they found was the ten least happy jobs actually were more financially lucrative and offered higher status than the ten happiest jobs. The difference? People in the happiest jobs had a higher sense of meaning. Less money, less status, but a higher sense of meaning. The main thing you bring home from your work is not a paycheck. The main thing you bring home from work is your soul. Work is a soul function. We’re made to create value. The writer of Ecclesiastes says, “There is nothing better for a person than that he should make his soul enjoy good in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God.

• ...all of us are somewhere on a journey to God, and the gap between least and most advanced is infinitely smaller than the gap between the most advanced and God himself.

• Jesus' offer is ease of spirit on the inside, the presence of peace and joy in the midst of difficult circumstances. If I aim at easy on the inside, I can withstand hard on the outside.

• There is a pain that means things are coming apart. But then, sometimes there is a pain that means that things might be able to come back together. Surgery can be as painful as stabbing, but it leads to healing. I knew I was beginning to heal.

• If you want to do the work of God, pay attention to people. Notice them. Especially the people nobody else notices.

• Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don't have.

• The soul seeks God with its whole being. Because it is desperate to be whole, the soul is God-smitten and God-crazy and God-obsessed. My mind may be obsessed with idols; my will may be enslaved to habits; my body may be consumed with appetites. But my soul will never find rest until it rests in God.

• We may be unlovely yet we are not unloved.

• The main measure of your devotion to God is not your devotional life. It is simply your life.

• God’s primary will for your life is not the achievements you accrue; it’s the person you become.

• To be fully known and fully loved is the most healing gift one human being can give another.

• Very often God’s will for you will be “I want you to decide,” because decision making is an indispensable part of character formation. God is primarily in the character-forming business, not the circumstance-shaping business.

• Even you can’t tell yourself how to change, because you didn’t create you. To love someone is to desire and work toward their becoming the best version of themselves. The one person in all the universe who can do this perfectly for you is God. He has no other agenda. He has no unmet needs he is hoping you can help him with. And he knows what the best version of you looks like. He delighted in the idea of it, and he is already working on it. The apostle Paul said, “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” Which means God is at work every moment to help you become his best version of you.

• I am so wrapped up in the hurt I have received that I do not notice the hurt I inflict.

• It is in Jesus’ name that desperate people pray, grateful people worship, and angry people swear. From christenings to weddings to sickrooms to funerals, it is in Jesus’ name that people are hatched, matched, patched, and dispatched.

• Here’s the deal: The more you think you’re entitled to, the less you will be grateful for.

• surrender is the glad and voluntary acknowledgment that there is a God and it is not me. His purposes are often wiser and better than our desires. Jesus does not come to rearrange the outside of our life the way we want. He comes to rearrange the inside of our life the way God wants. In surrender, I let go of my life. It is a Copernican revolution of the soul in which I take myself out of the center of the universe and place God there. I yield to Him. I offer obedience. I do what he says.

• The Spirit wants to make you threatening to all the forces of injustice and apathy and complacency that keep our world from flourishing.

• One of the most impressive aspects of Jesus is how he was impressed by unimpressive people.

• main job is to remain connected to God. When my primary focus is being present with him, everything else has a way of falling into place. When my primary focus becomes anything else, my inner vitality suffers, and I become a lesser version of myself. On vacation one summer.

• I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. No, I am its keeper, not its captain. I did not make it, and I cannot save it from death. That’s why soul-care is a different task than self-care. I do not care for my soul only for my own sake. It is only mine on loan, and it is coming due soon.

• For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.

• I don’t deserve a soul, yet I still have one,” writes Douglas Coupland. “I know because it hurts.

• Your soul will never find rest unless it finds its home. We find it in the simple daily discipline of asking ourselves, “Is God here in this moment?” If he is not, he can be.

• We are not the passive victim of others opinions. Their opinions are powerless until we validate them.

• Your soul is what integrates, what connects, what binds together your will, then your mind (those thoughts, feelings, and desires going on all the time), and then your body (with all of its appetites, habits, and behavior). God designed us so that our choices, our thoughts and desires, and our behavior would be in perfect harmony with each other and would be powered by an unbroken connection with God, in perfect harmony with him and with all of his creation. That is a well-ordered soul. The soul is what connects all those innermost parts together, connects them with God,

• What sin does is break this connection, with God and his love, and it disintegrates one’s life. That’s why the basic human problem is at the soul level. James uses a really interesting word — twice. In James 1:8 he says, “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways” (KJV). Then later he repeats, “Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.” The word translated “double-minded” in the New International Version is the Greek word dipsuchos. Psuche is the Greek word for soul, and literally it could be translated “you double-souled,” “you split-souled,” or “you fractured soul.” Sin fractures and shatters the soul.

• you will never achieve satisfaction if you make the goal of your life achieving satisfaction.

• God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are.

• every human being. Salvation doesn’t mean simply being rescued from the consequences of our wrong choices. It doesn’t mean being delivered into better circumstances. It means being changed. Salvation isn’t primarily a matter of going to the good place. It’s about becoming good people.

• sin always causes the disintegration of the soul.

• And we are so used to spiritually mediocre days... days lived in irritation and fear and self-preoccupations and frenzy... that we throw our lives away in a hurry...Take a deep breath. Put your cell phone away. Let your heart slow down. Let God take care of the world.

• We do not get tempted by that which repulses us. Temptation rarely begins by trying to get us to do something that is 180 degrees in the opposite direction of our values. It starts close to home with the passions and desires that God wired into us and tries to pull them a few degrees off course. That subtle deviation is enough to disrupt the flow of the Spirit in our life, so coming to recognize the pattern of sins most tempting to us is one of the most important steps in our spiritual life.

• Wisdom in the Bible is the ability to make great decisions. Wisdom is the art of living well.

• The soul knows a glory that the body cannot rob. In some ways, in some cases, the more the body revolts, the more the soul shines through. People may claim to believe that all you are is your body. But Pat said one time, “The only thing I can depend on with my body is that it will fail me. Somehow my body is mine, but it’s not me

• Don't wait for passion to lead you somewhere you're not. Start by bringing passion to the place where you are.

• Growth is not the ability to avoid problems. Growth is the ability to handle larger and more interesting problems.

• The Ten Commandments were never designed to be a stand-alone list of rules. They come within a relational context. They describe what living up to a certain value and a certain identity and a certain destiny looks like. In fact, in Judaism, they are not called the Ten Commandments. The Hebrew term is aseret hadevarim, which literally means “ten utterances” or “ten statements” because they were rooted in things that are meant to be in God’s kingdom. They flow out of how we were designed, who we were meant to be. We read them as “this is what you have to do,” but God was saying, “this is who you are.” That’s why we don’t so much break the Ten Commandments as we break ourselves when we violate them.

• In the Bible, God never gives anyone an easy job. God never comes to Abraham, or Moses, or Esther and says, “I’d like you to do me a favor, but it really shouldn’t take much time. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you.” God does not recruit like someone from the PTA. He is always intrusive, demanding, exhausting. He says we should expect that the world will be hard, and that our assignments will be hard. The Bible does use the word easy once, though. It came from Jesus. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened... and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

• Mission began with God. God has a mission. That’s why he made for himself a people, but his mission came before people. His mission came before the Bible. He gave his mission a Bible. He gave his mission a people. God’s mission, God’s project, is to bless. Open doors are an invitation to be part of the mission Dei.

• God knew I would grow more from having to make a decision than I would if I got a memo from heaven that would prevent me from growing.

• Trouble avoidance is tempting but not ennobling. Spiritual maturity is being able to face troubles without being troubled. At the end of our lives, it's the troubles we faced for the sake of a greater cause that will have the greatest meaning.

• As long as we have unsolved problems, unfulfilled desires, and a mustard seed of faith, we have all we need for a vibrant prayer life.

• Your soul is what integrates your will your intentions, your mind your thoughts and feelings, your values and conscience, and your body your face, body language, and actions into a single life. A soul is healthy... well-ordered... when there is harmony between these three entities and God’s intent for all creation. When you are connected with God and other people in life, you have a healthy soul.

• If your soul is healthy, no external circumstance can destroy your life. If your soul is unhealthy, no external circumstance can redeem your life.

• People will look different when I see them with God. People are a huge part of the “with God” life, because we have to live with people. We have to interact with them. How we get along with people says a lot about where our soul rests. When we are living with God, we will see people as God sees them. If I’m aware God is here with me, and God is looking at you at the same moment I’m looking at you, it will change how I respond to you. Instead of seeing you as the annoying server at McDonald’s who messed up my order, I will see you as someone God loved enough to send his Son to die on your behalf. I will see you as a real person who got up dreading going to work, dealing with impatient customers, being on her feet all day. In other words, I will no longer see you as everyone else sees you. This is exactly what Paul is after when he says, “From now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view.” From now on, now that my soul is centered with God in Jesus, I won’t look at people the same way.

• If you ask people who don’t believe in God why they don’t, the number one reason will be suffering. If you ask people who believe in God when they grew most spiritually, the number one answer will be suffering.

• For much of our lives, we live in the shallows. Then something happens... a crisis, a birth, a death... and we get this glimpse of tremendous depth. My soul becomes shallow when my interests and thoughts go no further than myself. A person should be deep because life itself is deep.

• The unlimited neediness of the soul matches the unlimited grace of God.

• May your expectations all be frustrated, May all of your plans be thwarted, May all of your desires be withered into nothingness, That you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and can sing and dance in the love of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

• Over time, grit is what separates fruitful lives from aimlessness.

• Your soul is what integrates, what connects, what binds together your will, then your mind (those thoughts, feelings, and desires going on all the time), and then your body (with all of its appetites, habits, and behavior). God designed us so that our choices, our thoughts and desires, and our behavior would be in perfect harmony with each other and would be powered by an unbroken connection with God, in perfect harmony with him and with all of his creation. That is a well-ordered soul.

• Flourishing is not measured by outward signs such as income, possessions, or attractiveness. It means becoming the person he he had in mind in creating you. Flourishing means moving toward God's best version of you.

• Somebody said that if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

• Author and former seminary professor Neal Plantinga once said something amazing about our capacity for addiction. He said it shows that we were wired for ecstasy. Not the drug, but pure, ecstatic joy. Our ceaseless craving for more, though it can kill us when unredeemed, may be a hint of the joy that we were made for when the soul finds its center in God.

• It may not quite reflect the maturity of “Thy will be done,” but it is better to be an honest mess before God than a dishonest saint.

• Our soul is like a stream of water, which gives strength, direction, and harmony to every other area of our life. When that stream is as it should be, we are constantly refreshed and exuberant in all we do, because our soul itself is then profusely rooted in the vastness of God and his kingdom, including nature; and all else within us is enlivened and directed by that stream. Therefore we are in harmony with God, reality, and the rest of human nature and nature at large.

• Despite the rise of the mental health profession, people are becoming increasingly vulnerable to depression. Why? Martin Seligman, a brilliant psychologist with no religious ax to grind, has a theory that it’s because we have replaced church, faith, and community with a tiny little unit that cannot bear the weight of meaning. That’s the self. We’re all about the self. We revolve our lives around ourselves. Ironically, the more obsessed we are with our selves, the more we neglect our souls. All of our language reflects this. If you’re empty, you need to fulfill yourself. If you’re stressed, learn how to take care of yourself. If you’re on a job interview, you have to believe in yourself. If you’re at the tattoo parlor, you must learn to express yourself. If someone dares to criticize you, you have to love yourself. If you’re not getting your own way, you have to stand up for yourself. What should you do on a date? You ought to be yourself. What if your self is a train wreck? What do you do then? Self is a stand-alone, do-it-yourself unit, while the soul reminds us we were not made for ourselves. The soul always exists before God. So soul is needed for deep art, poetry, and music. Former opera singer Scott Flaherty said it best: “I mean, when you sing you’re giving voice to your soul.” Imagine singing, “Then sings my self, my Savior God to thee,” or “Jesus, lover of my self.” Innately we know that the self is not the soul, even as we do everything we can to preserve it.

• Our world has replaced the word soul with the word self, and they are not the same thing. The more we focus on our selves, the more we neglect our souls.

• Work is a form of love. We cannot be fully human without creating value.

• The more concerned you are about your own

• Significance is about who we are before it is about what we do.

• God wanted Abram to be his friend, and friends trust each other, and you can’t learn to trust someone without a little risk and uncertainty and vulnerability.

• A brilliant teacher wins every argument she ever enters. She dominates every conversation. Everyone knows how smart she is and everyone avoids her. Her misery is the one problem she is not smart enough to figure out.

• It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

• But trust that doesn’t obey isn’t trust at all. It’s a mental game to say otherwise. It is the nature of genuine trust to obey; that’s what trust means. There is no other way. And it’s not true about just Jesus. There’s no other way to be happy in your doctor, or your trainer, or your vocal coach, or your auto mechanic. If you trust that they are competent, you are prepared to do what they say. What else would it mean to trust them?

• When I try to use God the way someone uses an Ouija board of a Magic 8 Ball or a horoscope, I violate the nature of the divine-human relationship. I make me the master and God my genie in a bottle. I make getting the right outcome my idol. And I move away from the spiritual growth that is God's deepest desire for me; God's primary will for me is the person I become and not the circumstances I inhabit.

• If you're going by faith, you're always a stranger in this world, because your home is God.

• The divine "go" comes into every life, but we must be willing to leave before we're willing to go.

• Do you ever pray to ask God to make your work successful? People sometimes wonder if it’s okay to pray for work to be successful. Of course! If success is becoming my god, I will have to find a way to dethrone it. But generally speaking, if you can’t pray for the success of what you’re doing, start doing something else!

• You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.

• gratification of mind and body will actually dismantle your soul.

• The ministry of bearing with one another is more than simply tolerating difficult people. It is also learning to hear God speak through them.

• my soul will never find rest until it rests in God.

• Our ceaseless craving for more, though it can kill us when unredeemed, may be a hint of the joy that we were made for when the soul finds its center in God.

• For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it.

• Jesus did not come as a servant in spite of the fact that he is God; he came precisely because of the fact that he is God.

• If you can't do great things, Mother Teresa used to say, do little things with great love. If you can't do them with great love, do them with a little love. If you can't do them with a little love, do them anyway. Love grows when people serve.

• Leadership is the art of disappointing people at a rate they can stand.

• There is something you can't fix, can't heal, or can't escape, and all you can do it trust God. Finding ultimate refuge in God means you become so immersed in his presence, so convinced of his goodness, so devoted to his lordship that you find even the cave is a perfectly safe place to be because he is there with you.

• The test of love is that it gives even when there is no expectation of a return.

• If we are serious about loving God, we must begin with people, all people. And especially we must learn to love those that the world generally discards.

• Scratch the surface of any cynic, and you will find a wounded idealist underneath. Because of previous pain or disappointment, cynics make their conclusions about life before the questions have even been asked. This means that beyond just seeing what is wrong with the world, cynics lack the courage to do something about it. The dynamic beneath cynicism is a fear of accepting responsibility.

• sometimes we do not realize how much we have to be grateful for until it is threatened.

• The soul integrates the will and mind and body. Sin disintegrates them. In sin, my appetite for lust or anger or superiority dominates my will. My will, which was made to rule my body, becomes enslaved to what my body wants. When I flatter other people, I learn to use my mouth and my face to conceal my true thoughts and intentions. This always requires energy: I am disintegrating my body from my mind. I hate, but I can’t admit it even to myself, so I must distort my perception of reality to rationalize my hatred: I disintegrate my thoughts from the reality. Sin ultimately makes long-term gratitude or friendship or meaning impossible. Sin eventually destroys my capacity even for enjoyment, let alone meaning. It distorts my perceptions, alienates my relationships, inflames my desires, and enslaves my will. This is what it means to lose your soul.

• God sees with utter clarity who we are. He is undeceived as to our warts and wickedness. But when God looks at us that is not all He sees. He also sees who we are intended to be, who we will one day become.

• genuine brokenness pleases God more than pretend spirituality.

• Peace doesn’t come from finding a lake with no storms. It comes from having Jesus in the boat.

• We will always take the most care of that which we value most deeply.

• Whether with an entire day, or periods of time set aside every day, your soul needs rest. Not a change of scenery or a spiritual retreat... those are fine and may contribute to rest. But to remain healthy, our souls need solitude with no agenda, no distractions, no noise. If someone asks you what you did in your “time apart,” the correct response should be, “Nothing.” Doing nothing does wonders for the soul.

• A soul without a center has difficulty making a decision. One of the pictures James uses of this condition is that the double-souled person is like a wave on the sea, driven forward one moment and backward the next. People whose souls are rooted in a center find it brings clarity to their decisions.

• When we reach out to God, we are lifting our souls up to be nurtured and healed. A soul centered in God always knows it has a heavenly Father who will hold its pain, its fear, its anxiety. This is spiritual life: to place the soul each moment in the presence and care of God. “My soul cleaves to you, your right hand upholds me.” It is much harder than it sounds to keep our souls centered on God. We hold on tightly, but often to the wrong things. But staying centered on God... his word, his ways... is the essence of life for the soul.

• Repenting of our sin is never despairing of our sin; it is always done in hope.

• A very simple way to guard your soul is to ask yourself, “Will this situation block my soul’s connection to God?

• God never grows two people the same way. God is a hand-crafter, not a mass-producer.

• Going through open doors means I will have to be able to trust God with my future when the path I’m called to take does not look like the obvious one.

• The more concerned you are about your own fulfillment, the less fulfilled you will be.

• Ironically, the more obsessed we are with our selves, the more we neglect our souls.

• The most important thing in your life,” Dallas said, “is not what you do; it’s who you become. That’s what you will take into eternity. You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.

• Arrange your days so that you experience total contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday life with God.

• A soul without a center lacks patience.

• The soul without a center is easily thrown.

• A disciplined person is one who can do the right thing at the right time in the right way with the right spirit.

• Self is a stand-alone, do-it-yourself unit, while the soul reminds us we were not made for ourselves. The soul always exists before God. So soul is needed for deep art, poetry, and music.

• If you have a positive attitude, you are likely to live a decade longer than people with a negative attitude.

• Is it really necessary to use those words, “Blessed are you”? While the point of this exercise is to feed your soul with gratitude, there really is something special about these words that is worth considering. To bless someone means to offer happiness or praise to them. When you say “Blessed are you, O Lord,” you are not only expressing gratitude, but you are saying, “I want to make you happy and praise you, God, with my gratitude for what you have done.” It’s a subtle reminder that gratitude is good for both the person expressing it and the one receiving it.

• Your face was meant to shine, he said. Glory always shines. Glory was meant to be shared. The Lord lift his countenance upon you... Lifting up a countenance is what we do to let someone know we are fully present. It is an act of self-giving.

• You’re a soul made by God, made for God, and made to need God, which means you were not made to be self-sufficient.

• What matters is not the accomplishments you achieve; what matters is the person you become.

• The first cost of incompetence is always the inability to perceive incompetence. In a room where one person is drunk and everyone else is sober, the drunk person is least aware of his intoxication.

• Ultimately, faith provides the greatest foundation for an open mind-set. The reason I don't have to prove my worth is that I am loved by God no matter what. The reason I can be open to tomorrow is that God is already there.

• Life's inevitability doesn't mean that preparation is unimportant... But "feeling ready" is not the ultimate criterion for the places you'll go.

• When I think thoughts that are false or unworthy, when I entertain desires that are in opposition to what God wants for my life, I damage my soul.

• Jesus takes his friends up a mountain. Not enough of them. Not enough faith. Doesn't matter. What matters isn't whether they're ready. What matters is that he's ready. And you and I never know when he's ready. He's in charge of that.

• When the soul is with God it doesn’t matter if you are a dishwasher or a president. The soul thrives not through our accomplishments but through simply being with God.

• When we live in the love of God, we begin to pay attention to people the way God pays attention to us.

• The “with God” life is not a life of more religious activities or devotions or trying to be good. It is a life of inner peace and contentment for your soul with the maker and manager of the universe. The “without God” life is the opposite. It is death. It will kill your soul.

• The best place to start doing life with God is in small moments.

• I was operating on the unspoken assumption that my inner world would be filled with life, peace, and joy once my external world was perfect.

• You must arrange your days so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday life with God.

• The space where we find rest and healing for our souls is solitude.

• The paradox of soul-satisfaction is this: When I die to myself, my soul comes alive. God says the wrong approach to soul thirst is through human achievement and material wealth. So soul-satisfaction is not about acquiring the right things but about acquiring the right soul. It is not something you buy, but something you receive freely from God. Hear these great words of the prophet Isaiah: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and [your soul] will delight in the richest of fare.” And it will be satisfied.

• When evangelist Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth, died in 2007, she chose to have engraved on her gravestone words that had nothing to do with her remarkable achievements. It had to do with the fact that as long as we are alive, God will be working on us, and then we will be free. She had been driving one day along a highway through a construction site, and there were miles of detours and cautionary signs and machinery and equipment. She finally came to the last one, and this final sign read, “End of construction. Thank you for your patience.” That’s what is written over Ruth Graham’s grave: “End of construction. Thank you for your patience.” Construction today. Freedom tomorrow.

• They devote themselves every day to what Jesus taught: to prayer, to fellowship, to breaking of bread together. They shared what they owned; they served each other’s needs. Ethnic barriers came down as they became known by the way they loved each other. It’s a different community, devoted to a Jesus way of life with God.

• I don’t know why some prayers get yeses and some prayers get nos. I know the anguish of a no when you want a yes more than you want anything in the world. But I don’t know why. I only know that in the Cross God’s no to his only Son was turned into God’s yes to every human being who ever lived.

• It’s not what’s on the other side of the door that gives me confidence to go through; it’s the one who goes with me.

• Conviction is not just the pain of getting caught or pain over consequences. It means a God-given, really sober sense of remorse over what I ought to feel remorseful about. It’s a God-given ache for goodness.

• Real life, however, begins when I die to the false god that is me.

• If you want to free your soul, you acknowledge that there is a spiritual order that God has designed for you. You are not the center of the universe. You are not the master of your fate. You are not the captain of your ship. There is a God, and you aren’t him. True freedom comes when you embrace God’s overall design for the world and your place in it. This is why in the Bible you see this strong connection between God’s law and soul-freedom.

• The most important task of your life is not what you do, but who you become.

• The most important thing about you,” Dallas would often say, “is not the things that you achieve; it is the person that you become.

• God says, 'I will measure my people by the one standard that counts. It’s very simple. Are people hungry? Feed them. Are people sick? Help them. Are people oppressed? Stick up for them. Are the widows lonely? Visit them. Are there uneducated children? Teach them. Are people rejected because of the color of their skin? Befriend them.

• We believe and we doubt. Believing and doubting share the same inevitability, but they are not equal. They cannot lay the same claim on our allegiance. They do not share the same power. If there are places beyond the cul-de-sac, doubt cannot take us there.

• So it goes for those of us who live in a cul-de-sac, where babies are brought home from the hospital and watched over, where hearts stop and feet slip, where we wonder if there is a hidden road that leads somewhere.

• The greatest battle of life is spiritual. It is the struggles with resentment and anger and greed and superiority that keep me from living in the flow with God.

• ...sin is often the attempt to meet a legitimate need in an illegitimate way.

• Skeptics would rather, even at their own expense, appear to be right than take the risk of trusting.

• Skepticism can keep us from blessing, can keep us trapped in two minds.

• No heart is as whole as a broken heart, and no faith is as solid as a wounded faith.

• This was the great irony of his day: The 'righteous' were more damaged by their righteousness than the sinners were by their sin.

• Sin is not just the wrong stuff we do; it’s the good we don’t do.

• We are not lost because we are going to wind up in the wrong place. We are going to wind up in the wrong place because we are lost.

• We must always be ready to sacrifice a lesser desire for the sake of living a greater life. On the other hand, nothing makes a human being more vulnerable to temptation than a joyless life.

• One of the barriers to feeding my mind through Scripture comes when I am confused or unsure whether I can believe a story, but try to force myself to believe it or avoid reading it so that my faith doesn’t get disturbed. Only when I read the Bible with an utter commitment to pursuing what I believe to be true, however, is it able to feed my mind.

• Our only hope is not for more willpower; it is for a new set of habits.

• The reason we love mission statements is we're made in the image of a missional God. His mission is to bless out of His great abundance. And that's your mission too.

• Perhaps open-door people make more mistakes but have fewer regrets.

• Don’t strive to advance yourself. Let God advance you. Serve others.

• No project is so great that it doesn't need God. No project is so small that it doesn't interest God.

• A deep soul lives in conscious awareness of eternity, not simply today.

• It’s not a form of barter. It’s grace.

• In solitude we remember we are not what anybody thinks of us - we are sheep tended to by the Shepherd.

• In other words, God's basic will for your life is not what you do or where you live or whether you marry or how much you make; it's who you become. God's primary will for your life is that you become a person of excellent character, wholesome liveliness, and divine love. That's what words like godliness and holy (which too often becomes religious cliches) point to.

• We must minister out of weakness. The reason we help others is not because we are strong and they need us; it is because if we don't help them, we will end up a hopeless relic.

• Humility is the freedom to stop trying to be what we're not, or pretending to be what we're not, and accepting our appropriate smallness.

• For the soul to be well, it needs to be with God.

• True love is willing to warn, reprove, confront or admonish when necessary.

• Because you have been created by God as a unique person, his plan to grow you will not look the same as his plan to grow anyone else. What would grow an orchid would drown a cactus.

• The alternative to soul-acceptance is soul-fatigue. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the body. When we stay up too late and rise too early; when we try to fuel ourselves for the day with coffee and a donut in the morning and Red Bull in the afternoon; when we refuse to take the time to exercise and we eat foods that clog our brains and arteries; when we constantly try to guess which line at the grocery store will move faster and which car in which lane at the stoplight will move faster and which parking space is closest to the mall, our bodies grow weary. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the mind. When we are bombarded by information all day at work... When multiple screens are always clamoring for our attention... When we carry around mental lists of errands not yet done and bills not yet paid and emails not yet replied to... When we try to push unpleasant emotions under the surface like holding beach balls under the water at a swimming pool... our minds grow weary. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the will. We have so many decisions to make. When we are trying to decide what clothes will create the best possible impression, which foods will bring us the most pleasure, which tasks at work will bring us the most success, which entertainment options will make us the most happy, which people we dare to disappoint, which events we must attend, even what vacation destination will be most enjoyable, the need to make decisions overwhelms us. The sheer length of the menu at Cheesecake Factory oppresses us. Sometimes college students choose double majors, not because they want to study two fields, but simply because they cannot make the decision to say “no” to either one. Our wills grow weary with so many choices.

• If I think God’s aim is to produce rule-followers, spiritual growth will always be an obligation rather than a desire of my heart.

• Despite the rise of the mental health profession, people are becoming increasingly vulnerable to depression. Why? Martin Seligman, a brilliant psychologist with no religious ax to grind, has a theory that it’s because we have replaced church, faith, and community with a tiny little unit that cannot bear the weight of meaning. That’s the self. We’re all about the self. We revolve our lives around ourselves.

• The soul of one person can become intertwined with the soul of another. Aristotle is supposed to have said: “What is friendship? It is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.” The ancient term for such a relationship is “soul friend,” defined as one with whom I have no secrets. The ancient Celtic Christians said that “a person without a soul friend is like a body without a head.

• When the will has become enslaved by its need, when the mind has become obsessed with the object of its desire, when the appetite of the body has become master rather than servant, the soul is disordered. The ultimate reality behind human dissatisfaction is sinful souls that have been cut off from the God we were made to rest in. That’s why we’re dissatisfied.

• The soul is not well when we rush so much. If it does not get the rest it needs, it becomes fatigued.

• People would rather debate doctrine or beliefs or tradition or interpretation than actually do what Jesus said. It’s not rocket science. Just go do it. Practice loving a difficult person or try forgiving someone. Give away some money. Tell someone thank you. Encourage a friend. Bless an enemy. Say, “I’m sorry.” Worship God. You already know more than you need to know.

• The world conspires against our souls by blinding us to the depth and glory of their God-given design and tempting us to be satisfied with immediate gratification.

• All of our language reflects this. If you’re empty, you need to fulfill yourself. If you’re stressed, learn how to take care of yourself. If you’re on a job interview, you have to believe in yourself. If you’re at the tattoo parlor, you must learn to express yourself. If someone dares to criticize you, you have to love yourself. If you’re not getting your own way, you have to stand up for yourself. What should you do on a date? You ought to be yourself. What if your self is a train wreck? What do you do then?

• To paraphrase a line from a movie: There will be great pain, and there will be great joy. In the end, joy wins. So if joy has not yet won, it is not yet the end. Jesus is crucified. The pain is overwhelming... not the end. Jesus is risen... the joy is overwhelming.

• Ask God to make your work go well today.

• The truth is, the soul’s infinite capacity to desire is the mirror image of God’s infinite capacity to give.

• A soul can be saved. But it will take softness and depth and space. The world won't help much.

• Your flourishing self pours blessings into your relationships. You find other people to be a source of wonder. They often bring you energy. When you are with them, you listen deeply. You are struck by their dreams. You bless. You are able to disclose your own thoughts and feelings in a way that invites openness in others. You quickly admit your errors, and you freely forgive. Relationally, your languishing self is often troubled. You are undisciplined in what you say, sometimes reverting to sarcasm, sometimes to gossip, sometimes to flattery. You isolate. You dominate. You attack. You withdraw.

• The more concerned you are about your own fulfillment, the less fulfilled you will be. When your life is devoted to yourself, it is as small as a grain of wheat. When your life is given to God, however, it is as if that grain is planted in rich soil, growing into part of a much bigger project.

• All flesh is as the grass. Life spans can range from a day to a hundred thousand years. Yet all these living things will die, and it doesn’t bother them at all. They don’t need a future. We are different. We have a radar for eternity. Human beings have an instinct that life does not end with the grave. And we have a hunger this world cannot satisfy. Again, you don’t have to believe in the Bible to see this. Look at the pyramids. Visit a nursing home. God has placed eternity in the human heart. The Bible says the reason God has done that is that we were made for an eternal existence with him. And the most important thing we are doing in this life is preparing for the life that is going to come.

• The message of the Incarnation is that God loves us not because of what we do or accomplish, but because he made us and has chosen to be with us. It is one thing for us to be aware of ourselves. It’s another thing to know that God... the holy Creator of the universe... is fully aware of us, and yet still loves us, wholly, without reservation, and without end.

• The temptation battle is the most important battle you will ever fight.

• So soul-satisfaction is not about acquiring the right things but about acquiring the right soul. It is not something you buy, but something you receive freely from God.

• The Lord bless you and keep you; The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

• Very rarely in the Bible does God come to someone and say, “Stay.” Almost never does God interrupt someone and ask them to remain in comfort, safety, and familiarity. He opens a door and calls them to come through it.

• Jesus used the word easy only once. But it wasn’t about our circumstances. The same Jesus who said, “I am the door” (John 10:7, KJV) also said, “My yoke is easy” (Matthew 11:30).

• They shared what they owned; they served each other’s needs. Ethnic barriers came down as they became known by the way they loved each other. It’s a different community, devoted to a Jesus way of life with God. Now it's our tun Over the recent centuries, every once in a while a follower of Jesus gets a vision for this kind of intimate life with God.

• Every heart comes with a door. Having the door of someone's heart open up to you is one of the greatest gifts of life. To respond well requires time, energy, vulnerability, and discernment.

• God is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.

• Going through open doors will mean I have to trust God with my name.

• Amazingly enough, research shows that the best moments of our lives don’t come from leisure or pleasure. They don’t involve sex or chocolate. They come when we are totally immersed in a significant task that is challenging, yet matches up well to our highest abilities. In these moments, a person is so caught up in an activity that time somehow seems to be altered; their attention is fully focused, but without having to work at it. They are deeply aware without being self-conscious; they are being stretched and challenged, but without a sense of stress or worry. They have a sense of engagement or oneness with what they are doing.

• The character of Abraham's faith is determined by the character of the God in whom he believed.

• God doesn’t say, “I’ve set before you a hammock.

• If "easy" is my criterion for door judging, then every time I hit "hard", I will be filled with doubt about God, myself, and my choice. But an open door does not promise an easy life.

• Grace always and only consists of what will help someone come home to the Father.

• Gradually she came to understand that she was in the grips of idolatry she'd never been warned about: idolatry of place. Going through that open door helped loosen an attachment that kept her from being able to find God anywhere.

• Life is facing and solving problems. When God calls people, he calls them to face a problem.

• If I stew over what might have been, I rob myself of energy and spirit to see all the small doors God sets before me each day. I rob myself of precisely the spiritual assets I need to find life with God right here, right now.

• Have you no soul?” is really another way of saying, “Is it possible that your mind with its values and conscience are not even troubled by what your will has chosen and your body carried out?

• We often hear people say that we should put family above work. Oddly enough, we will not find this thought expressed in the Bible. I will say that again: Nowhere in the Bible does it say that family is more important than work. What the Bible does say is that love matters above all. Families are to be one vehicle through which we express love. Our work is to be another. We will be accountable for our families; we will also be accountable for our work. Often, from a biblical perspective, families were (and are) a place where work gets done.

• Salvation doesn’t mean simply being rescued from the consequences of our wrong choices. It doesn’t mean being delivered into better circumstances. It means being changed. Salvation isn’t primarily a matter of going to the good place. It’s about becoming good people.

• Many Christians expend so much energy and worry trying not to sin. The goal is not to try to sin less. In all your efforts to keep from sinning, what are you focusing on? Sin. God wants you to focus on him. To be with him. “Abide in me.” Just relax and learn to enjoy his presence. Every day is a collection of moments, 86,400 seconds in a day. How many of them can you live with God? Start where you are and grow from there. God wants to be with you every moment.

• Biblically, waiting is not just something we have to do until we get what we want. Waiting is part of the process of becoming what God wants us to be.

• I need to worship because without it I can forget that I have a Big God beside me and live in fear. I need to worship because without it I can forget his calling and begin to live in a spirit of self-preoccupation. I need to worship because without it I lose a sense of wonder and gratitude and plod through life with blinders on. I need worship because my natural tendency is toward self-reliance and stubborn independence.

• There is such a love, a love that creates value in what is loved. There is a love that turns rag dolls into priceless treasures. There is a love that fastens itself onto ragged little creatures, for reasons that no one could ever quite figure out, and makes them precious and valued beyond calculation. This is love beyond reason. This is the love of God.

• Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

• The Bible does not say you are God’s appliance; it says you are his masterpiece. Appliances get mass-produced.

• The psalmist says “I have set the LORD always before me.” Paul says, “We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” They speak to the need for our souls to be completely and thoroughly with God. But as both of these verses suggest, it does not happen automatically. “Set” and “take captive” are active verbs, implying that you have a role in determining where your soul rests.

• If I have the courage to acknowledge my limits and embrace them, I can experience enormous freedom. If I lack this courage, I will be imprisoned by them.

• But in a world where victimhood has become status, souls go unexamined for hardness.

• True repentance never leads to despair. It's leads home. It leads to grace.

• Your soul is not the same thing as your emotions. We live in a world where we’re encouraged to think that our feelings dominate our lives and that we are powerless over them. But even contemporary research indicates the power God has placed in the soul to be master of our emotions. In one study, researchers presented subjects with pictures of angry faces. Half of the participants were told simply to observe the faces. The other half were instructed to label the emotion on each face. The simple act of labeling the emotion reduced its emotional impact on their own moods. It also reduced the activation of the brain region associated with strong primitive emotion.

• What do we do in the dark night? We do nothing. We wait. We remember that we are not God. We hold on. We ask for help. We do less. We resign from things, we rest more, we stop going to church, we ask somebody else to pray because we can’t. We let go of our need to hurry through it. You can’t run in the dark.

• Our problem is that this world does not teach us to pay attention to what matters. We circulate résumés that chronicle what we have accomplished, not who we have become. The advertisements we watch, the conversations we hold, the criteria by which we are judged, and the entertainment we consume all inflame our desire to change our situation, while God waits to redeem our souls.

• The greatest bloodbaths in the history of the human race were recorded in the twentieth century in countries that sought to eliminate God, worship, and faith.

• For Jesus, identity and acceptance come before achievement and ministry. This is joy no one can take away. You cannot earn acceptance.

• Your soul connects your thoughts and your sensations and your gratitude and your will and sends a message to your entire being. You can send that message to other persons; you can send it to God.

• Good habits are enormously freeing... we accomplish good things almost on autopilot. One study from Duke University found that more than 40 percent of the actions people take every day aren’t decisions, but habits. Good habits free us, but when sin becomes a habit, our souls lose their freedom.

• We’re generally quite good at doing something, but we’re really bad at doing nothing.

• Self-improvement is no more God’s plan than self-salvation. God’s plan is not just for us to be saved by grace... it is for us to live by grace.

• Your eternal destiny is not cosmic retirement; it is to be part of a tremendously creative project, under unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast scale, with ever-increasing cycles of fruitfulness and enjoyment... that is the prophetic vision which eye has not seen and ear has not heard.

• We are free to feed our minds from every good source, but there is no source like the Bible. It is a written revelation of who God is and of what God’s purposes are for humanity. No book comes close to it in influence or significance. Eugene Peterson writes, “Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love.” Yet consumer researchers say that the average Bible owner possesses nine Bibles and is looking for more. Something is lacking.

• The widow of Zarephath fed Elijah even though she had but a handful of flour and a little oil in a jug. (1 Kings 17:7–24) In this story she is recklessly generous. She gives the last of what she has to Elijah.

• When you discover your strengths, you are learning an indispensable part of what it means to be made in the image of God.