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" Sometimes, an inability to believe in Satan reflects a larger inability to believe in a spiritual plane at all. "

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" I'm not sure ministry can ever have the urgency it requires if it is not aware of evil, both externally and internally. "

" Opposition is an inevitable reality of pastoral life. "

" When it comes to sermon writing, generally there are two problems. Some preachers love the research stage but hate the writing, and they start writing too late. Others don't like doing research, so they move way too fast to the writing part. "

" Women are the first witnesses to the resurrection and pillars of the early church. "

" At the heart of Christian faith is the story of Jesus' death and resurrection. "

" Being deeply contented with God in my everyday life is a focused attitude. It is always available. It means practicing letting go of my obsession with how I'm doing. It means training myself to learn to actually be present with people, and seeking to love them. "

" There are dozens of references to God in the Scriptures for every one to the figure of Satan. This reflects a sometimes forgotten theological truth that the devil is by no means God's counterpart. He is a creature, not the Creator. "

" As a preacher, my charge is to proclaim the message of the Scriptures. To help the people in my congregation become a people of the book. I love getting to do this. "

" A healthy soul is whole and integrated. It is connected to God. A person with a healthy soul is at peace with God, with himself, and with other people. "

" The single dynamic that helps people be most aware of God and most experiencing the fruit of the Spirit is gratitude. "

" The New Testament doesn't present Jesus as a single man to cover up his humanity. It presents him as a single man because... he was a single man. "

" Jesus viewed his own destiny - to be glorified in and through death - as an expression of a kind of cosmic principle: the pathway to life runs through death. "

" I wrote 'Soul Keeping' because we are taught more about how to care for our cars than how to steward our souls. But you cannot have an impactful life with an impoverished soul. "

" Politics, after all, is largely about power. And power goes to the core of our issues of control and narcissism and need to be right and tendency to divide the human race into 'us' vs. 'them.' "

" Some leaders are not intimidated by opposition; they actually thrive on it. It wakes them up. It energizes them. It calls them to battle. It causes them to mobilize their thoughts and energy. "

" Churches need to figure out how they will address the spiritual lives of their staffs and leadership teams. "

" It strikes me that presidential campaigns can often bring out the worst as well as the best in us. "

" Pastors have historically understood their primary battle to be not the battle to build a big church, but the battle against the power of sin. "

" As much as we complain about it, though, there's part of us that is drawn to a hurried life. It makes us feel important. It keeps the adrenaline pumping. It means I don't have to look too closely at my heart or life. It keeps us from feeling our loneliness. "

" One of the reasons I'm an interesting person to be married to is my intensely late-blooming self-awareness. "

" We do not need answers or formulas to minister in crisis. "

" Prudence is foresight and far-sightedness. It's the ability to make immediate decisions on the basis of their longer-range effects. "

" The irony is that 'looking down on everybody else' is a violation of the law of love, which, according to Jesus, is the absolute essence of righteousness. "

" The church is in the hope business. We, of all people, ought to be known most for our hope because our hope is founded on something deeper than human ability or wishful thinking. "

" For most of us, the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them. "

" Sin is very important to the soul because sin is what disintegrates the soul; it's what attacks the soul. Sin kind of is to the soul what cancer is to the body. "

" As a preacher who is fully human, and clearly not divine, I can't speak as Jesus did. But I do seek to speak truth that carries weight and authority. All of us who preach the gospel aspire to speak under the authority of Jesus. "

" God has decided, for his own good reasons, that people are not transformed outside of community. "

" God has entrusted us with his most precious treasure - people. He asks us to shepherd and mold them into strong disciples, with brave faith and good character. "

" When preaching is done right, it can change lives. When it's done badly, my failure goes beyond the merely human. "