Your deepest, darkest sins and your shameful secrets are simply irrelevant when it comes to the counterintuitive, ecstatic announcement of the gospel. So are your goodness, your rightness, your church attendance, and all of the wise, moral, mature decisions you have made and actions you have taken.

I can't find one place in the teachings of Jesus, or the Bible for that matter, where we are to identity ourselves first and foremost as sinners.

Forgive me for being so ordinary while claiming to know so extraordinary a God.

Secularism and Religion are both all about your personal performance. The Gospel is the performance of another applied to you.

Our government needs the church, because only those humble enough to admit they're sinners can bring democracy the tolerance it requires to survive

God has been acting honorably throughout history regrading what He wants. We're the ones at fault. God is good. And I still really, truly like Him

Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.

The only people who have no bad tendencies are dead.

A right knowledge of sin lies at the root of all saving Christianity.

I'd rather live my life knowing that I'm not perfect than spend my whole life pretending to be.

It's the messy parts that make us human, so we should embrace them too —pat ourselves on the back for getting through them rather than being angry for having gotten into them in the first place

I did the best I could, and in some arenas, my best was not good enough. I've made some bad choices.