I would have rebelled against parental authority, no matter what. When I was 15, I started painting my face and making my own clothes.
There will be no people in heaven who want to be around their things more than Jesus.
There is a great gulf between the Christianity that wrestles with whether to worship at the cost of imprisonment and death, and the Christianity that wrestles with whether the kids should play soccer on Sunday morning.
You may be going through things right now that are painfully preparing you for some precious service to Jesus and to his people. When a person strikes rock bottom with a sense of nothingness or helplessness, he may find that he has struck the Rock of Ages
Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. It's a way of overcoming every obstacle to everlasting joy in God. If we don't want God above all things, we have not been converted by the gospel.
The strength of patience hangs on our capacity to believe that God is up to something good for us in all our delays and detours.
The highest mental health is not liking myself but being joyfully interested in everything but myself.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
I called my wife up on the cell phone and said baby you aint gonna believe this, i go, we just hit a deer with the airplane. and there was a silence on the other end of the line followed by. . OH MY GOD. ! were you on the ground? I said nope, santa was makin one last run.
Once you get your own family clear in your head, whatever your problems are with it, you're better prepared for being an adult in the world.
I watch a lot of TV, I drink a lot of coffee, but you know what's really addictive? Heroin.