The greatest men stand on their values and pray on their knees.

When we elevate the relevance of our intellectual acumen to the point where we now declare God as irrelevant, we can be certain that the one thing that’s become strikingly relevant is our imminent destruction.

How many enemies were headed my way whose battle lines I never saw and whose piercing arrows never flew in my direction because God destroyed them before I ever caught sight of them, or they of me? More than I can count, but never more than God can destroy.

With God, my brokenness is nothing more than the platform from which He can demonstrate why He is God.

What is being late other than the time-table that I have assigned to something because I’m not certain God’s got a watch that’s in synch with mine.

Hope is not based on the off-chance that things ‘might’ work out for us, for that kind of thinking is based on the perception that God’s will can be taken captive by our circumstances. Rather, hope is based on a God for whom circumstances are the working out of His will.

Pray is not the exercise of the faint-hearted, for it takes more determination than we can imagine to set aside the press of our agendas in order to partner with God in the working out of His.

Will we choose to be the ‘pieces’ that our sin has blown us into? Or will we turn to the God who can pick up each one and gently assemble them into the ‘whole’ that we’ve never known simply because it’s a ‘whole’ that He has never forgotten?

And while following God might be deemed by many as ignorance, or escapism, or legalism, or some other negative label, I would simply say, “Look around you.” “Look around you.” And in doing so ask, “Is the fool the one who continually attempts to sail sunken ships, or the one who follows a risen Christ?