Show me a person who refuses to act on the obvious and I’ll show you a person who has powerful reasons that he doesn’t want to disclose

It is not true that God has predetermined each one’s actions for good or for ill; it is we who are caught in webs of compulsion and only his empowering call offers us choices to act freely.

What our world needs just as badly as good leadership is thoughtful, committed ‘followership’.

Notice how most leaders who run the gauntlet to make it to the top have been forced by voters to make promises that they will find impossible to keep?

Nations, religions, and individuals are judged not by the ideals that they project but by the inhumanity that they are willing to tolerate.

The biblical writers know nothing about faith as mere acceptance of doctrines. The best synonym for a biblical faith is ‘trusting, obedient, devotion’. Of this, Son of Man is author and perfecter.

We all behave as if we were two selves. There is the self that gives in repeatedly to coffee with sugar or soda pop. That self seems to have no sympathy for the self that suffers the head-banging toothache that follows a year later.

The goal of Proverbs is to bring the emotional consequences of each action into immediate confrontation with the person in the moment of decision.

Hurt people hurt people

Protracted unremitting pain in the soul sets off a self- destructive impulse in the best of us; it expresses itself in everything from self-neglect, self-sabotage, and risk-taking, to addiction, abuse and self-harm.

John Haley wrote,” Anger- the burst of fireworks… the stillness of shame.