Here are 25 more helpful quotes from the book:
- Just as God equips Christians for building up the Body of Christ, so he also equips all people with talents and gifts for various kinds of work, for the purpose of building up the human community.
- Fear-based repentance makes us hate ourselves. Joy-based repentance makes us hate the sin.
- Without the gospel of Jesus, we will have to toil not for the joy of serving others, nor the satisfaction of a job well done, but to make a name for ourselves.
- Prayer is both conversation and encounter with God. These two concepts give us a definition of prayer and a set of tools for deepening our prayer lives.
- Prayer, then, is both awe and intimacy, struggle and reality. These will not happen every time we pray, but each should be a major component of our prayer over the course of our lives.
- Prayer is continuing a conversation that God has started through his Word and his grace, which eventually becomes a full encounter with him.
- The Bible is in the end a single, great story that comes to a climax in Jesus Christ.
- All the major figures and leaders of the Scriptures point us to Christ, the ultimate leader who calls out and forms a people for God.
- The best way to guard your heart for wisdom is worship, in which the mouth, the mind, the imagination, and even the body are all oriented to God.
- The problem of the workaholic, for example, is not that we love work too much, but that we love God too little, relative to our career.
- The Bible does not say that every difficulty is the result of sin—but it does teach that every sin will bring you into difficulty.
- Most often the storms of life come upon us not as the consequence of a particular sin but as the unavoidable consequence of living in a fallen, troubled world.
- To know who you are is to know what you have given yourself to, what controls you, what you most fundamentally trust.
- Often the first step in coming to one’s senses spiritually is when we finally start thinking of somebody—anybody—other than ourselves.
- With 20/20 hindsight, we can see that the most important lessons we have learned in life are the result of God’s severe mercies. They are events that were difficult or even excruciating at the time but later came to yield more good in our lives than we could have foreseen.
- In Jesus Christ, God entered the world and paid the price to buy us away from our sin and enslavements by dying on the cross.
- If Jesus was raised from the dead, it changes everything: how we conduct relationships, our attitudes toward wealth and power, how we work in our vocations, our understanding and practice of sexuality, race relations, and justice.
- The cross and resurrection is the Great Reversal. Christ saves us through weakness, by giving up power and succumbing to a seeming defeat. But he triumphs—not despite the weakness and loss of power but because of it and through it.
- Real Christian faith believes that Jesus saves us through his death and resurrection so we can be accepted by sheer grace. That is the gospel—the good news that we are saved by the work of Christ through grace.
- God’s forgiveness cannot in any way be merited—it will have to be absolutely free.
- This is the good news: This King will return and take his throne, and everything sad will come untrue. We will see him face to face finally.
- Spiritual resurrection means that we are, in a sense, living in heaven while still on earth, living in the future while still being in the present.
- Everything in this life is going to be taken away from us, except one thing: God’s love, which can go into death with us and take us through it and into his arms. It’s the one thing you can’t lose.
- Christmas means that we are so lost, so unable to save ourselves, that nothing less than the death of the Son of God himself could save us. That means you are not somebody who can pull yourself together and live a moral and good life.
- We are so united in Christ in the Father’s eyes that when he sees us, he sees Jesus.