“The Spirit inspired the Word and therefore He goes where the Word goes. The more of God's Word you know and love, the more of God's Spirit you will experience.”

“what makes the prosperity gospel so attractive is that it caters to the desires of the fallen human heart. It promises much while requiring little. It panders to the flesh.”

“In these experiences we feel our sin again, and by them we feel our need for the delivering power of Christ again. These experiences are meant to humble and benefit us, ultimately building our assurance in Christ rather than destroying us, and we should never lose heart in the darkness. “For sin the Lord will often hide his face and permit dark clouds to hang over us. Yet we must not give way. We cannot recover ourselves but by believing.” But God is genuinely grieved by our willful sins, a profoundly important reality in the Christian life well captured by Puritan Thomas Watson: “The sins of God’s own children go nearer to his heart.”56”

“In his work on the sinner’s soul, Christ remakes the heart of stone into a heart of flesh, and he opens the sinner’s eyes to the incredible riches of God’s Word. This divine illumination comes from Christ alone as the Logos, or Word. Christ is our all-sufficient Prophet, our teacher, and the self-disclosure of the invisible God (John 8:26; 14:9; 17:8). Christ is the telescope by which we see God in creation, and the clue that leads us through the history of divine providence. Through Christ the Bible is applied to the hearts and lives of Christians.”

“Anxiety seems to be an intense desire for something, accompanied by a fear of the consequences of not receiving it.”

“I have no sure sight of God's glory except through his word. The word mediates the glory, and the glory confirms the word.”

“Delighting in God was not a mere preference or option in life; it was our joyful duty and should be the single passion of our lives. Therefore to resolve to maximize his happiness in God was to resolve to show him more glorious than all other sources of happiness. Seeking happiness in God and glorifying God were the same.”

“While the great prize in marriage is Christ-centered intimacy, the great prize in dating is Christ-centered clarity.”

“Cheap intimacy feels real for the moment, but you get what you pay for.”

“Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.”

“When a man leads his wife, he is leading her to depend on Christ, not on himself.”

“It’s then that Jesus gives us more of himself, proving over and over that he is enough, that he is good, that there is more joy in him than in the grain and wine that abound (Psalm 4:7)—or in the kids who never make messes and the dinner that prepares itself and the schedules that operate seamlessly. He is better.”

“But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime—the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth, and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment.”

“Precisely in the most desperate moments, when having the masculine role feels most unfair, when we’re our most tired, running on fumes, and need to keep providing in all these aspects, this is when the provision of God tastes the sweetest.”

“Christ is the ground of our masculinity. He took Adamic humanity into the grave with him, and emerged with a new way to be human, and a renewed way of being a man.”

“Jesus is the man—the true and better man—who exemplifies and empowers us to walk in his steps as those who embrace our God-given design to be a man, and act like one.”

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

“Racial ignorance is a luxury of the majority culture. We really must be willing to place ourselves in the posture of a learner.”

“If our vertical reconciliation to God required intentionality, then our horizontal reconciliation necessitates the same intentionality.”

“He did not make us all the same. He loves diversity. He revels in it. He created a world that pulses with difference, that explodes with color, that includes roaring waterfalls and self-inflating lizards and rapt-at-attention meerkats. But mankind, man and woman, are the pinnacle of his creation.”