When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
The gospel alone liberates you to live a life of scandalous generosity, unrestrained sacrifice, uncommon valor, and unbounded courage.
The people who tend to be the most gracious are those who know how badly they need grace
Your identity is firmly anchored in Christ's accomplishment, not yours; his strength, not yours; his performance, not yours; his victory, not yours.
Legalism says God will love us if we change. The gospel says God will change us because He loves us.
God's acceptance of us cannot be gained by our successes nor forfeited by our failures.
Here's one way I can know that I've forgotten the gospel of grace: when your sin bothers me more than my sin.
Yet it would be unfair to the generality of our kind to ascribe to their intellectual and moral weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from their primitive patterns. For it should not be forgotten that by their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the vast majority of mankind, who refused to purchase a chance of saving their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species.
I love being presented a character that boggles my mind. I have to do a lot of work and explore how I can make the guy absolutely real and absolutely believable to myself. And then, I go to work on doing that for other people.
Really annoys me any time I see Asian fusion too. Asia is a big place; which Asian are you talking about? You notice it's never Uzbek or Tajik food. It's Thai, and it's generally insulting.
I think [Vladimir] Putin probably assumes he can't make a deal with me anymore because politically it would be unpopular for a politician to be making a deal.