One of two things happens over time. Either your theology will conform to your reality, and your expectations will get smaller and smaller until you can hardly believe God for anything. Or your reality will conform to your theology, and your expectations will get bigger and bigger until you can believe God for absolutely everything!

Maybe faith has less to do with gaining knowledge and more to do with causing wonder. Maybe a relationship with God doesn't simplify your lives. Maybe it complicates our lives in ways that they should be complicated.

Maximum improbability equals maximum possibility.

At some point, most of us stop living out of imagination and start living out of memory. Instead of creating the future, we start repeating the past. Instead of living by faith, we live by logic. Instead of going after our dreams, we stop circling Jericho. But it doesn't have to be that way.

If you take thirty linear steps, you're ninety feet from where you started. But if you take thirty exponential steps, you've circled the earth twenty-six times!2 Faith isn't linear. Faith is exponential.

For the place God calls us into isn't doubt free—how can any place where we walk by faith and not by sight be that? No, the holy wild is where we have driving and haunting doubts, God-hungry doubts that pull us to our knees, force us to the Word, make us wrestle all night and not let go until He blesses us. The holy wild throngs with true skeptics.

Our faith doesn't magically make our assumptions about Jesus and the Bible true. Faith can't turn a falsehood into truth. Rightly understood, it's not a blind belief in the unbelievable; it's a rational belief based on a preponderance of evidence.

The serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces.

I admire the serene assurance of those who have religious faith. It is wonderful to observe the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.

Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.

Faith enables the believing soul to treat the future as present and the invisible as seen.

The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.