Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

Prayer is the one hand with which we grasp the invisible; fasting the other, with which we let loose and cast away the visible.

If I worked hard and prayed even harder, anything was possible.

“Delight yourself in the Lord, and he’ll give you the desires of your heart.

“Apart from Christ, I can do nothing.”

Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, “Wow! What a ride!”

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

Jesus’ suffering and death is not a Hatfields-and-McCoys story demanding retaliation. The gist of the religion that transformed the world is: God’s only son came to Earth to take the punishment we deserved.

If the Jews had somehow managed to block Jesus’ crucifixion and He had died in old age of natural causes, there would be no salvation through Christ and no Christianity. Whatever possible responses there may be to that story, this is not one of them: Damn those Jews for being a part of God’s plan to save my eternal soul!

The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy.

This is the will of God, that by doing good you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men.