“Average is easy because all you’ve got to do nothing.”  –Jon Acuff

What are you doing–and doing with intensity–that lasts?

“Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is ‘finding his place in [the world]‘ while really it is finding its place in him.”. –CS Lewis

100% of the world’s brokenness and sadness could be healed by looking into the Bible and into the faces of babies.

It would make us joyful children again, ourselves.  Yet, even more so–because it wouldn’t be built on only childish things.

“From time to time, I get notes from attendees thanking me for creating a church to which they can invite their neighbors and unchurched family members.  As appreciative as I am, it still strikes me as odd that someone would have to thank a pastor for creating a church that is doing the very thing the church was created to do in the first place.  Why should that be the exception and not the rule?  It’s a shame that so many churches are married to a designed-by-Christians-FOR-Christians-only culture.  A culture in which they TALK about the Great Commission, SING SONGS about the Great Commission, but REFUSE TO REORGANIZE their churches around the Great Commission.  These are often the same churches where members TALK about grace, sing about how ‘amazing’ it is, but create graceless cultures where only those who play by [their] rules feel welcome.  . . . Churches shouldn’t do anything that makes it unnecessarily difficult for people who are turning to God.”

–Andy Stanley, Deep and Wide

When there is a vacuum of love within our soul, hate, bitterness, envy, lust, racism, or arrogance rush to fill the empty space.  This is most dangerous because there is nothing more explosive.

 ”When you allow bitterness, jealousy, envy, racism, lust, greed, and arrogance to fill our souls, we create an environment WITHIN us to become agents of violence.  We live in a time when the most terrifying bomb is not a nuclear one, but a human one.  This is where humanity has come.  This is how far we have ‘evolved.’  We strap bombs around our chests, lure innocents into our presence, and then consider ourselves heroes as we destroy everything around us.  If this were not bad enough, for some it has become a proof of spirituality.  There are people all around us waiting to E-X-P-L-O-D-E!   How many of us are walking around with fuses already lit?” 

–Erwin McManus, Soul Cravings

“Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.”

–C.S. Lewis