Not to decide is a decision to remain on the road you’re on, and go where it goes. Staying on the road you’ve been on only goes to the places you’ve been.

Humility certainly begins with the recognition of our weakness and insufficiency, our shame and confusion. If, however, it doesn’t advance beyond that, then our humility is just egoism in disguise

It is impossible to stomp the angel out of anyone’s face once it takes up residence there – it just winds up spreading the power around farther and deeper.

People in our time are looking for meaning and purpose, which have become critically absent as the world has grown more secular. They are finding it among people who have Bibles in their hands, and pray with the scriptures daily, several times daily.

It would be better all around if there were more evidence about the nearness of heaven, and who is in it. Saint You? Saint Me? It would be better all around if we were the evidence.

The ministry of the word is still keeping people busy. One large Catholic parish today is four or five times the size of the whole earliest Church. Evangelists for such parishes need to be people deeply immersed in the thought world of the Bible. They need to read it and talk about it daily, they need to apply it boldly and prudently

Some believers are rather reluctant to tell our stories about God’s mighty hand because we don’t think of them as facts. The lessons of our stories are not thereby forever lost, but they can only be learned the hard way.

The Church was not able to hold on to its first organizational structure in large degree because it didn’t have the instructional resources to manage a Church that size. But now we have the Bible, and twenty centuries of truly excellent reflection on it by some of the greatest minds in human history, all of it embedded in the Mass that is celebrated millions of times a day all over the world.

The problem with a great many people is not that they don’t know the truth, or at least suspect it. They just wish they didn’t, and don’t want to be associated with the people who do.

The barriers to Heaven in 21st century America aren’t on the outside, but on the inside. Jesus is tapping at the window, telling us not that the “times of refreshment” (3:19) are on the way, but that they have arrived, and the proof is Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

The evidence that a religious revival may be underway is clarifying and solidifying. It would be even more solid and clear if the Church were to get out in front of this.

There is not one of us who does not struggle with some unrighteous attachment, some small, stubborn, clinging bit of death that nobody notices, but we know is there. It’s just a little bit, but enough to keep us out of heaven.

Satan never appears with scars, but God does because He has gone to the very limits of God-forsakenness, where people proclaim God dead, wish God dead, and participate in the killing.

This IS the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, that the perfect sacrifice has already been made, that the flaming sword of Eden has been taken away and the gate to heaven is open.

Was what Judas did really that much worse than what Peter did? Or the rest of the disciples? Peter denied even knowing Jesus. All the rest of them ran away.