Quotes from Frank Viola

The triune God stands at the beginning and at the end of the Christian pilgrimage and, therefore, at the center of Christian faith.

The Lord has a unique way of preparing His servants for His work. It's one that involves transformation. And transformation always involves emptying, suffering, and loss. Humanity's way is to hand you a method. Divinity's way is to hand you a cross.

As Thomas Moore once put it, "Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal." Jesus is heaven personified.

A word of encouragement: if your foundations are in Jesus Christ, then you can weather the storm.

Note that there is a monumental difference between well-motivated humans working for God in their own strength, wisdom, and power versus God working through humans.

It doesn't matter how great your sins are; God's grace is big enough to forgive and cleanse them.

Sin and love are exact opposites. Love is benefiting others at the expense of yourself. Sin is benefiting yourself at the expense of others. Sin is selfishness; love is selflessness.

An exhortation from one beggar to another: keep sacrificing. Keep losing. Keep laying your life down. Keep loving your enemies. Keep blessing those who despise you. Keep refusing to return fire upon those who bad-mouth you. Keep pouring your life into others, even if those people never acknowledge it and even if others never notice. Keep faithfully serving your Lord without looking back. Why? Because there is One who is watching. And only His opinion matters.

The fact is, Jesus was the greatest human being who ever lived, and if all we have to look forward to in life is the frustration of trying to be someone we are not, then we've got better ways of enjoying the interval between birth and death. But the "good news" is that Jesus /doesn't/ want us to be "like" Him. He wants to share His resurrection life with us. He doesn't want us to imitate Him; instead, Christ, the Unspeakable Gift, wants to live in and through us.

Christians get very angry at those who sin differently than they do.

Because the presbyters were the ones administering the Lord's Supper, they began to be called priests.560 More startling, the bishop came to be regarded as the high priest who could forgive sins!561 All of these trends obscured the New Testament reality that all believers are priests unto God.

Martha, seeking to serve the Lord according to her own thoughts, was distracted and diverted. The