Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly.

We have been told the lie ever since we can remember: human beings are basically nice and good. Everyone is born equal and innocent and self-sufficient. The world is a pleasant, harmless place. We are born free. If we are in chains now, it is someone's fault, and we can correct it with just a little more intelligence or effort or time.

When men and women get their hands on religion, one of the first things they often do is turn it into an instrument for controlling others, either putting or keeping them "in their place." The history of such religious manipulation and coercion is long and tedious. It is little wonder that people who have only known religion on such terms experience release or escape from it as freedom. The problem is that the freedom turns out to be short-lived.

Sin destroys our capacity to live. It weakens our vitality. ... It incapacitates us from living out a healthy love and a vigorous peace. We need deliverance from it. God provides deliverance from it, decade after decade, generation after generation, 'according to the will of our God and Father.

Certainly you may quit if you wish. You may say no to God. It's a free faith. You may choose the crooked way. He will not keep you against your will. But it is not the kind of thing you fall into by chance or slip into by ignorance. Defection requires a deliberate, sustained and determined act of rejection.

I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

I don't think I represent some new category. I think I do represent kind of a freethinker.

The gospel is not a philosophy of repression, as so many regard it. It is a plan of freedom that gives discipline to appetite and direction to behavior.

Protestantism came to America to make America Protestant. It was assumed that was to be done through faith in the reasonableness of the common man and the establishment of a democratic republic.

The toppling of idols - even respectable, admired, best-practice, fastest-growing idols - is always the road to liberation.

I have always marched to my own beat, and most frequently, it was inconsistent not only with my own immediate family, but with my culture as well.