“The elders of the Church do not rule over auto mechanics, or garbage collection, or interior design. First, it is none of their business, and secondly, they would do a bad job.”
No Salt or Sap
“There is nothing more suffocating than being trapped in a Christless Christianity. A Christless Christianity is all ‘Thou shalt not. Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch.’ These things are of no value, Paul says in Colossians, in checking fleshly indulgence (Col. 2:22-23). A Christless Christianity is not really Christianity at all: it has no blood in it, no salt in it, not sap in it. It’s not alive.”
Keep Your Kids, p. 119
Nothing Else to Give
“The principles here is that you export what you manufacture. Whatever your fields are growing, that is what gets loaded onto the ships. Whatever your life and heart are cultivating, that is what you are going to give to your kids. You can’t give anything else.”
Keep Your Kids, p. 114
The Cassandra Effect
“The difficulty manifests itself when accurate predictions are made about moral deteriorations. In such cases, vindication is usually no vindication at all. By the time the predicted moral deterioration is complete, nobody is in any moral shape to analyze what just happened.”
Virgins and Volcanoes, pp. 3-4
Legalism Is Not When Someone Loves God More Than I Do
“Application is not legalism. Obedience is not legalism. Legalism is inventing your own standard. But doing what God said to do the way that God said to do it is not legalism at all: ‘hear therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it may be well with thee.’”
Keep Your Kids, p. 112
The Ultimate Standard
“God does not just give a set of laws. He tells us to love Him. We aren’t told to grit out teeth and conform ourselves externally to a certain set of actions. The principal command is to love. The ultimate standard is to love.”
Keep Your Kids, p. 112
Don’t Try This at Home
“Ruth was a virtuous woman, but she had some reputation issues: generally you don’t go out to the threshing floor and sleep at a man’s feet until he wakes up. That text is not usually used in courtship seminars.”
Keep Your Kids, p. 106
Loyalty to Christ, or Just Anti-American?
“If you find yourself in real solidarity with Palestinian Christians, and you want to know if it is love for Jesus, or just your nascent inner-anti-Semite rising, just ask yourself this question . . . Who do you have more in common with—a Palestinian non-Christian or a devout Christian woman with hoop earrings who just got back from the RNC, where she spent the entire convention wearing a big hat shaped like an elephant?”
Use the Camera of Faith
“Christendom will be easier to see when it can be photographed, but we are called to see it whether it can be photographed or not.”
Clear and Direct Push Offs
“The world is full of people who cross boundaries, and Christian women (wanting to be gracious) will often have difficulty telling a random stranger to pound sand. Now they don’t have to use that phrase, of course, but whatever they say, it should be clear and direct. Men who cross boundaries are frequently not masters of subtlety.”
Keep Your Kids, p. 103