“The greatest joy is not finding something that we’ve been looking for. The greatest joy is when we’d given up on ever finding it and then it found us.”

“I don’t need to paint a picture of what I want my life to look like. What I need to do is to study the picture that God painted of me so that I can better understand how to live out the splendor of the painting.”

“It’s not that God can’t rescue us. It’s that we choose not to be rescued because we’re too blind to see the necessity of it.”

“The darkest darkness that I can possibly imagine is the darkness that I thought to be light.”

“I incessantly wallow in the ‘muck and mire’ of the terrible messes that I have made. And when I realize that God has long ago removed all the ‘muck and mire,’ I suddenly understand that the only wallowing that’s going on is in my head.”

“Please God deliver us from the road of destruction, Amen.”

“God has placed Himself squarely within the confines of my confines so that within my reach there lays the very thing that I need to break me out of those confines. Therefore, if I remain confined, it may be because I don’t understand that I’m confined. And if I don’t understand that I’m confined, I can be certain that I don’t understand my need for God. And that is likely the greatest confinement of all.”

“If I had my way, I would declare a moratorium on public preaching of ‘the plan of salvation’ in America for one to two years. Then I would call on everyone who has use of the airwaves and the pulpits to preach the holiness of God, the righteousness of God, and the Law of God until sinners would cry out, ‘What must we do to be saved?” Then I would take them off in a corner and whisper the gospel to them. Don’t use John 3:16. Such drastic action is needed because we have a gospel hardened generation of sinners by telling them how to be saved before they have any understanding why they need to be saved.”

“Your heart of devotion and obedience is not in vain. Who knows but God how many people have come near to you and were forever changed simply by the fragrance of his love in you? Who knows but God if he will put you before kings and leaders to speak the truth, redirecting the future of nations? Who knows when that small crack in the dam of our enemy’s plans will give way and God’s glory will truly cover the earth as the sea? Do not become distracted or discouraged by the death around you. Death must always give way when the life of Christ enters the picture.”

“The glory of God is as destructive of evil as it is creative of good.”

“Don’t creationists ever wonder about the fact that the paleontologists found ape-like skulls with the ‘human leg and foot bones,’ rather than the other way around, i.e., human skulls with ‘ape leg and foot bones?’ . . . Come on, creationists, think about it! Did God hide the human skulls, only leaving behind leg and foot bones belonging to human midgets with misshapen feet, and mix such bones only with the skulls of ape-like creatures with larger cranial capacities than living apes? What a ‘kidder’ the creationists’ God must be.”

“If a man cannot serve two masters, neither can Christianity, or several thousand of them as the case may be.”

“He does not call those who are worthy, but those whom He will.”

“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.”

“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.”