An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board and a wrecking ball at the site.

Comfort can be a dangerous thing. You stick around home all the time where it's safe and nothing ever changes, and before you know it, you get set in your ways and you quit learning, you quit changing, you don't grow anymore.

The goal is always the same. I want to change people's lives and bring them closer to the Lord in a new way. I want to confront them with an issue.

The fact is, Jesus was the greatest human being who ever lived, and if all we have to look forward to in life is the frustration of trying to be someone we are not, then we've got better ways of enjoying the interval between birth and death. But the "good news" is that Jesus /doesn't/ want us to be "like" Him. He wants to share His resurrection life with us. He doesn't want us to imitate Him; instead, Christ, the Unspeakable Gift, wants to live in and through us.

Are we living in a culture that is so infatuated with change that we have forgotten that the church is about transformation, not mere change?

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.

Rome is burning, Jesus says. Drop your fiddle, change your life and come to Me. Let go of the good days that never were - a regimented church you never attended, traditional virtues you never practiced, legalistic obedience you never honored, and a sterile orthodoxy you never accepted. The old era is done. The decisive inbreak of God has happened.

The gospel will persuade no one unless it has so convicted us that we are transformed by it.

Whatever we have done in the past, be it good or evil, great or small, is irrelevant to our stance before God today. It is only now that we are in the presence of God.

Our ability to put on the mind of Christ Jesus comes by virtue of our sacred union with him. This is the gift of the Holy Spirit: "God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us" (Romans 5:5). The power to love God wholeheartedly is the birthright of those reborn in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. It is what allows us to move out into the world as crystalline bearers of God's image.

Over a hundred years ago in the Deep South, a phrase commonplace in our Christian culture today, born again, was seldom used. Rather, the words used to describe the breakthrough into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ were: "I was seized by the power of a great affection.

The second journey begins when we know we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the morning program.