Getting honest with ourselves does not make us unacceptable to God. It does not distance us from God, but draws us to Him—as nothing else can—and opens us anew to the flow of grace. While Jesus calls each of us to a more perfect life, we cannot achieve it on our own. To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace. It is only through grace that any of us could dare to hope that we could become more like Christ.

Jesus comes in the way of weakness, giving us the chance to love him and making us feel that we have something to give him.

The poor man and woman of the gospel have made peace with their flawed existence. They are aware of their lack of wholeness, their brokenness, the simple fact that they don't have it all together. While they do not excuse their sin, they are humbly aware that sin is precisely what has caused them to throw themselves at the mercy of the Father. They do not pretend to be anything but what they are: sinners saved by grace.

When I am divided within myself, when I am so preoccupied with my own sins, egocentricity, and moral failures that I cannot hear the anguished cry of others, then I have subtly reestablished self as the center of my focus and concern.

Any church that will not accept that it consists of sinful men and women, and exists for them, implicitly rejects the gospel of grace.

He who thinks that he is finished, is finished. How true. Those who think that they have arrived, have lost their way. Those who think they have reached their goal, have missed it. Those who think they are saints, are demons.

The Pharisees were the religious experts of their day. They possessed much information about God, but they had no personal relationship with Him. Jesus thanked His Father that it was not to these "experts" that the Father had revealed spiritual truth, but rather to those who were humble and who recognized their need for God's revelation.

In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority.

God wants us to pray, and he wants to hear our prayers-not because we are worthy, but because he is merciful.

We were delighted to have Nigel as a producer. The only problem is that Nigel is so famous that he seems to dominate most interviews without being there.

One night, I knocked out Mr. T, kicked Cyndi Lauper, chased Dick Clark back to his locker room, and slapped Little Richard.

Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: 'I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty.