1

Truth even in the most whispered tones will always roar.

2

Faith means I chose not to know, which is different than ignorance which refuses to know.

3

I am thankful that there are those among us who have sacrificed dearly on behalf of us. And I ardently pray to God that I might be less like myself and more like them.

4

To hide is our insecurities telling God that what we fear is bigger than Who He is. And in this case, maybe we should shoot the messenger.

5

With God, brokenness is nothing more than the stage upon which the impossible is about to happen.

6

The greatest threat that I need to be rescued from is myself. Everything comes a lot easier after that.

7

God is confident enough in me to be all things confident for me.

8

The compass does not create that which it points us to.

9

Prayer is where I acknowledge a battle that I can’t win by embracing a God Who can’t lose.

10

The ferocity of the storm is always measured by the compass that we’ve taken into it.

11

If you remove God you have nothing left other than the illusion that you have something left.

12

In the end, the only thing that a life unreclaimed by God can claim is that it has nothing to claim despite claims to the contrary.

13

The mind of man is a cistern in a land where it never rains.

14

The certainty of a future rests in the fact that God created it, He already exists in it, and your role has been established in advance of your arrival there.

15

One brilliant manifestation of God’s mercy is found in the elimination of the holes that are continually being dug by the men who are attempting to fill them.

16

Men seek to imitate the God that they deny in order to convince themselves that they are the god that they are in denial of.

17

The greatest blessings arise when we reject the lesser blessings of men so that we are never dulled to the infinitely greater blessings of God.

18

Godly ethics have boundaries that are impervious to the installation of gates regardless of which direction they might swing.

19

Kindness is the lesser side of ourselves subjugated to something greater than ourselves.

20

To attempt to make myself clean is only to become dirtier in the cleaning.

21

The death and resurrection of Jesus didn’t scrub us clean. Rather, it purged us of everything filthy so that scrubbing was unnecessary.

22

The idea of God is repulsive to those who really don’t have an idea of God.

23

It the mirror doesn’t give me much back it’s because it’s not designed to reflect the things within me that make the reflection truly magnificent.

24

If you have a hard time believing that God chose you, it’s probably because you haven’t chosen you.

25

Maybe we were chosen because in being chosen we were granted the power to choose another who needed to be chosen worse than we did.

26

God will never allow a flood in your life without providing you a boat within which the storm itself is repelled, the waves ordered calm, and the course set undeterred.

27

I have always been convinced that what I see is but a terribly thin slice of all that exists. As such, I don’t like living in slices.

28

The God-shaped void set in every heart rests in a perfectly preserved state in a place called the atheist.

29

The reason that life seems hopeless is that we’ve placed our hope in that which has none.

30

Give God a little more time to do what you would screw up if you did it now.

31

There is far more to this existence than how men have defined it through the exhibition of their limitations.

32

If we deny the Creator we are in essence denying His creation, of which we are the pinnacle.

33

The evidence for God rests in the fact that we’ve assumed ourselves to be Him.

34

Fear is the misery of the faithless soul.

35

Lack of faith renders all else anemic.

36

The impossible was created in order to give us something to solve.

37

If you created the map, you’ll probably never find the road.

38

Easter is the brazen declaration that there is nothing that we can destroy that need remain destroyed.

39

Unless our hope is rooted in something bigger than that which seeks to crush our hope we will never experience anything greater than the ‘hope’ of hope.

40

Thinking that we can provide a light to our path is assuming that we have the batteries for a flashlight that we never had.

41

If God’s not in it, neither is anything else.

42

The exercise of faith is to risk moving beyond the logic of men and in doing so realizing that the real risk would have been not to move.

43

Jesus pointed to something that's irresistibly compelling because it's something immovably authentic.

44

Easter is our tomorrow insured.

45

Easter is where every ending would forever be held hostage to a beginning.

46

Why is it that we don’t worry about a compass until we’re lost in a wilderness of our own making?

47

If a grave is empty, is it a grave? I wonder how Jesus would answer that.

48

The pain of today can never offset the inevitability of tomorrow.

49

No yesterday can hold tomorrow’s sun captive to a horizon from which it cannot rise.

50

Vision tempered by fear is blindness.

51

To refuse to live your dream is to choose to endure a nightmare.

52

We are our greatest prison and our worst warden.

53

Love both wounds deeply and heals powerfully. And we dare not allow the wounds to crush our belief in the healing.

54

Peace as rumor and hope as the stuff of myth is the manifestation of the person who cannot see beyond the short horizon of circumstance.

55

Even in the dark there remains a path.

56

The absence of hope is never the absence of hope.

57

Darkness cannot extinguish the light. Only our lack of faith in the light can do that.

58

Hope refuses the constraints of our fear.

59

The light at the end of the tunnel doesn’t matter if you’re going backwards.

60

Don’t judge God by the people who follow Him.

61

Success may not have been ‘around the corner,’ but the fact that I persisted until I was is success.

62

Ministry is about changing the world by transforming the people within it, not by giving them some sort of emotional sedative.

63

The only fool that we can control is the one that we hope to never become.

64

No betrayal is so big that God’s commitment to us and presence within us is not bigger.

65

I might have my holes, but the healing of today means that they will be smaller in every tomorrow, including the one that is now only hours away.

66

If you can dream a dream, you have begun fashioning a template for a greater reality. And at this point, the greatest dream may be believing in that reality.

67

For many of us, the greatest dream is to believe in our dream.

68

Dear God, help me not to pray in order to get something. Help me to pray in order to do something.

69

Trauma buries me. But prayer has a huge shovel.

70

Never think that the existence of hope is dependent upon your ability to see it.

71

The nature of hope is such that it will grow in direct proportion to our lack of belief in it.

72

With God, the word ‘impossible’ is itself impossible.

73

Apathy is hope relegated to myth.

74

The greatest obstacle is not the size of the dream. Rather, it’s the state of our attitude.

75

Christmas is not a story to be told. It is an event to be declared.

76

I would much prefer to see endings as the womb within which beginnings are born.

77

Me minus God makes the impossible, impossible. Me plus God makes the impossible, possible.

78

Every ending is the backside of a beginning.

79

The worst that things get, the greater the opportunity to best the worst.

80

I believe that the healing for everything that’s ever been broken in my life was on its way long before the brokenness thought that it had its way.

81

Hope is durable, even when I’m not.

82

The Bible might say things that are hard to embrace at times. But to not embrace them is certain to make life hard all of the time.

83

Only one tree remained standing in a field cleared of trees. Yet that never deterred it from being a tree.

84

What you can’t do lies far beyond what you think you can’t do.

85

Vision is seeing what others can’t while fighting the people who believe that you don’t.

86

Without the sacred, life has no breath.

87

God will demand everything of you lest He lose all of you.

88

How pathetic is the man who lives as if his existence is defined by the limitations of who he is within that existence.

89

Christmas was deliverance delivered.

90

To plan a vision is to kill it before you have the chance to dream it.

91

I have never lost a minute praying. For the minutes given over to prayer always create hours given over to my life.

92

This week God clearly told me to get out of my boxes. And I rather quickly discovered that trading my current box for a bigger one was not what He meant.

93

If God gave you everything that you wanted, you would have nothing that you need. And in that case, you would end up with neither.

94

If it’s big enough for us to handle, God’s not in it and we shouldn’t be either.

95

I’m not asking you to believe in God, for the choice to believe in men will reveal God soon enough.

96

My belief in God is constantly reinforced by the incessant failures of all of the people who declare that there is no God.

97

I don’t think that it’s my belief in God that bothers you. I think that it’s your lack of belief.

98

I often wonder what it will take for me to finally understand that every promise that does not come from God was broken before it was ever sent.

99

Trust’ in anything other than God is nothing more than a gamble in disguise.

100

To invite God into my life is not simply an exchange of power. Rather it is an exchange of everything.

101

We are either running to something, or running from something. But possibly the most dangerous running of all is to deny that we’re running in the first place.

102

The less I choose to know of myself and the more I choose to know of God, the more I will know of myself and God.

103

I have been driven to desperation more times than I can count. But it is here that I have been driven to the greatest inspiration that I can contain.

104

The inspiration needed to lead in times of great distress is to be found in walking among those being led, and in doing so to refuse to walk any place else.

105

Real relationships are the product of time spent, which is why so many of us have so few of them.

106

If the bridge of communication is solid, then they’ll never be too much water under the bridge that lays upstream.

107

Abandonment is sacrifice thrown into reverse.

108

If the currency is anything other than time and consistency, trust will never be earned.

109

The most critical time in any battle is not when I’m fatigued, it’s when I no longer care.

110

Even if yesterday was wildly successful, I still don’t want to repeat it. Rather, I want to build on it.

111

Sometimes the greatest victories are neither great nor victories.

112

I have defined victory not by the outcome of any battle, but by the integrity with which I fought the battle.

113

Too often surrender is exhaustion that was teetering on the edge of victory.

114

Depravity has nothing to do with wealth.

115

It doesn’t matter what’s coming at us. God defeated it before it ever left wherever it was coming from.

116

God designed you to stand on your shackles.

117

Many of the advances that we make in the battles that we’re fighting today will be evidenced in the battles that we won’t have to fight tomorrow.

118

Always determine to rise from defeat, for every victory ever achieved was preceded by a host of defeats that laid the groundwork for those victories.

119

Make the story of your success greater than the accounts of your failures.

120

Your failures are not embarrassments to be buried. Rather, they are seeds to be planted.

121

To stay down in whatever place I was last knocked down is to decide that life is done long before it is done.

122

Real relationships are the product of time spent, which is why so many of us have so few of them.

123

Greed can take the whole of our intelligence and render it ‘stupid’ in a far, far shorter period of time than it took for our intelligence to become intelligent.

124

The idea of an idea can be as powerful as the idea itself.

125

Words pen the lyrics of the soul.

126

Comfort is the goal of the man with no vision.

127

If our existence were limited to the science that attempts to explain it, our existence wouldn’t exist.

128

To assume that all knowledge is accessible to the instruments of science or human logic is to hold this existence to the confines of both.

129

The science behind a sunrise will never explain the joy of experiencing it.

130

Intelligence and wisdom are certainly compatible, however they are rarely seen in each other’s company.

131

Most often, what I don’t know will have a vastly greater bearing on my life that what I do know.

132

Filling a hole in a manner that doesn’t address how it was dug is to fill a hole that is certain to remain empty.

133

What I do profess to know is that my lack of knowledge becomes clearer the more knowledgeable that I become.

134

If I have all of the gear but I can’t bait the hook, the fish have nothing to worry about.

135

Wisdom is not lofty. Instead, it is simply the dogged determination to apply what we know despite the fact that we may not like what we know.

136

The greatest knowledge is to know that what we know is always less than what we need to know.

137

I am never smart enough to be smart enough.

138

I don’t think that I want to sail in a ship built by someone who has no idea of what water is. Yet, our culture is deluged with just such shipbuilders.

139

Accepting that I know so little about myself is the beginning of understanding everything about life.

140

To say that we don’t know is not necessarily a sign of stupidity. Rather, it is often an indication of wisdom.

141

What I know is dwarfed by what I don’t know. And if I know this, I know more than those who think they know.