If we live solely within the scope of our sorely limited humanity, the word ‘end’ will mean nothing other than what it says. But if we dare to live within the scope of God’s eternal promises, every time the word ‘end’ appears the word ‘beginning’ will be hot on its heels.

What’s so hard about believing in miracles? Afterall, aren’t miracles simply the things that we said couldn’t be done? And I must confess that I am far too small to be the authority on what can or can’t be done.

I would ask two questions. The first is, “How is that which is dead within me any different from anything else that God has raised from the dead?” And the second question would be, “How is His passion to raise the dead within me any different than His passion to raise anything else that He has raised?” And the answer to both is “It is not and it is not.” So, am I ready to be raised or am I not?

I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this before, but if death is beaten, so is everything else. And because God set His sights on beating death, we can build our lives on achieving anything.

A dead man walking out of a tomb utterly obliterates all of our tediously constructed paradigms about life. And in pondering what God did that morning, maybe we need to ask if our paradigms are, in fact, the very tombs that you and I need to walk out of.

When Christmas has passed, if I find that I am none the better for having engaged it, the only explanation that I can muster up is that I can be handed the greatest of gifts, yet still have the emptiest of hands. And finding myself in that dreadful condition, I am left to assume that the fool within me has chosen to live with the hands that now define me instead of embracing the God Who wishes to fill me.

If God didn’t design the road, you can be assured that it’s a very short path to a really steep cliff.

If I presume the flood that engulfs me to be bigger than the God who surrounds me, the real flood is the absence of my faith.

How many times have the obstacles consumed my attention and crushed my vision? And at the point that I have been so frightened so as to have made something that big, I have at the same time made God something terribly little.