Outside of the Christian worldview, mistakes and setbacks can lead to reflection and self-examination…but you can never, without a great leap of imagination, believe that the universe is lovingly correcting you with a determined eye towards your eternal growth and good
You must know and confess that you need direction from somewhere else – that left to your own resources, you actually won’t travel down the best pathways. You will get lost; you’ll encounter dangers; you’ll run into dead ends.
Fear of the Lord means starting everything with God. It means recognizing God is the central reality in the universe, not me, not even the universe in its past, present, or future form
In short, it is good to hold the highest view and vision of your spouse, but no man is married to the Proverbs 31 woman, and no woman has Proverbs 31 on her resume.
A fool is always right in his own eyes. He is not interested in learning something new. He is not interested in being challenged. He is not interested in growing. Why should he be? He has already arrived.
Don’t assume, because you have experienced poverty or marginalization of some sort, that you are automatically above inflicting the same sort of oppression that you received.
It is not the act of wounding you that qualifies somebody as your friend; rather it is the quality of being your friend that enables someone to wound you in a good way.
In our world, name-calling and labeling is often a shortcut substitute for the hard labor of moral reasoning. You can quickly find yourself on the wrong side of the aisle, regardless of which side you hope to belong to.
As much as we might wish this was not the case, and plead the contrary, we conduct all our relationships within a transactional frame.
When we enlist the pursuit of wisdom to strive for an optimal outcome, what we are seeking is to align our own thinking as much as possible with God’s thinking.
Addiction is a short-term escape from pain that is purchased at a high interest rate of future pain.
The key to understanding and disarming our greed is digging a little bit deeper. Why do you want more money? What is it that you hope to gain as a result of having more resources?