If you don't take a Sabbath, something is wrong. You're doing too much, you're being too much in charge. You've got to quit, one day a week, and just watch what God is doing when you're not doing anything.

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There are no experts in the company of Jesus. We are all beginners, necessarily followers, because we don’t know where we are going.

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Sloth is most often evidenced in busyness ... in frantic running around, trying to be everything to everyone, and then having no time to listen or pray, no time to become the person who is doing these things.

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When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn't go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.

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Feelings are great liars. If Christians worshipped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. We think that if we don’t feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.

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The gospel is never about everybody else; it is always about you, about me. The gospel is never truth in general; it's always a truth in specific. The gospel is never a commentary on ideas or cultures or conditions; it's always about actual persons, actual pains, actual troubles, actual sin; you, me; who you are and what you've done; who I am and what I've done.

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Pity can be nearsighted and condescending; shared suffering can be dignifying and life-changing.

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My job is not to solve people's problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.

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The silence that makes it possible to hear God speak also makes it possible for us to hear the world's words for what they really are - tinny and unconvincing lies

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Real faith is refined in the fires and storms of pain.

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