How you think is massively influenced and largely determined by what you read, hear, and watch.

You are where you are because of your thinking. Your thinking dictates your decisions. Decisions are choices.

you will never please everyone, nor should pleasing everyone be your goal. For example, to seek the approval of someone who is lazy or jealous is to cast your pearls before swine. You will find that God rarely uses a person whose main concern is what others are thinking.

Every decision you ever made — the best ones and the worst ones — were, at their base, merely a product of your thinking at that time.

What a person thinks is determined by how a person thinks. This is true whether the conclusion at which a person arrives is accurate, safe, and profitable — or stupid and vicious.

If you do not choose, you'll end up like everyone else in the world who has never chosen. The people who do not actively choose a road to travel always default to the road everyone else is already on.

If the source were simply a few behavioral habits, you would have conquered them already.

Tim Keller writes, "When the church as a whole is no longer seen as speaking to questions that transcend politics, and when it is no longer united by a common faith that transcends politics, then the world sees strong evidence that Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx were right, that religion is really just a cover for people wanting to get their way in the world."13

To get from where we don't want to be to where we do want to be requires two things: time and a change of direction.

Do you know why people are prone to make such foolish moral decisions? Because something always whispers to us that our situations are unique: Nobody has ever felt this way before.

What have we fallen in love with that's not as effective as it used to be? What do we love doing that's not really working? What's off limits for discussion? Do we have any "old couches" that need to be thrown out?

But I'm not sitting around praying for revival either. I grew up in the "pray for revival" culture.