We need to quit living as if the purpose of life is to arrive safely at death.

When you pray regularly, you never know when God will show up or speak up. Today could be the day. When you live in prayer mode, you live with holy anticipation. You know that coincidences are providences. Any moment can turn into a holy moment. God can invade the reality of your life at three o'clock one afternoon and change everything.

Throwing down your staff is letting go and letting God. And that's counterintuitive for those of us who are control freaks. As our executive pastor Joel Schmidgall likes to say, "You can have faith or you can have control, but you cannot have both." If you want God to do something off the chart, you have to take your hands off the controls.

When we try to make things go faster, we usually slow things down. When we try to make things easier, we usually make them harder. Don't try to manufacture your own miracles. Don't try to answer your own prayers. Don't try to do God's job for Him. Stay humble. Stay patient. Stay focused.

Long before God laid the foundation of the earth, He anticipated and provided for everything we'd ever need. You just need to give Him an opportunity to prove Himself faithful.

if you can truly surrender to Him, you will do more, be more, experience more. Life will just be more.

When we take matters into our own hands, we take God out of the equation.

The path of least resistance never gets us where we want to go. Shortcuts always end up being cul-de-sacs. The key to spiritual growth is the willingness to go out of your way for God. You will find God in uncomfortable places at inconvenient times. But if you go out of your way for God, God will go out of His way for you. Crash the party!

If you let fear dictate your decisions, you will live defensively, reactively, cautiously. Living by faith is playing offense with your life.

Only God can make the appointment, but only you can keep the appointment.

We don't get a vision from God by going to conferences. We might get some good ideas, but God-ideas are only revealed in the presence of God.

Maybe we need to quit playing defense and start playing offense. Maybe we need to quit letting our circumstances get between us and God and let God get between us and our circumstances. Maybe we need to stop talking to God about our problem and start talking to our problem about God.