Quotes from Timothy S. Lane

In God's plan, our quest for personal identity is meant to drive us back to him as Creator so that we find our meaning and purpose in him. When we live out a sense of who we are IN CHRIST we live our lives based on all we have been given by Christ. This keeps us from seeking to get those things from the people and situations around us. Much of the disappointments and heartache we experience is the result of our attempts to get something from relationships that we already have in Christ.

Your relationships will take you beyond the boundaries of your normal strength. Encouragement gives struggling people eyes to see the unseen Christ.

Every good relationship we have is a gift of God's grace. Left to ourselves, nothing good would happen. Our problem has everything to do with sin and our potential has everything to do with Christ. Sin always draws towards self-interest. It is possible that even in our most altruistic moments are driven by what we get out of them

If you look for God in your relationships, you will always find things to be thankful for. When God reigns in our hearts, peace reigns in our relationships. This work will only be complete in heaven but there is much we can enjoy now.

Talk like an ambassador (Eph 4:29-30). 1)Consider the person (only what is helpful for building others up) 2) Consider the problem (according to their needs) 3) Consider the process (that it may benefit those who listen)

Scripture makes it clear that these responses are not forced upon us by the pressures of the situation. What I do comes from inside me. The things that happen to me will influence my responses but never determine them. Rather, these responses flow out of the thoughts and motives of my heart.

The theology you live out is much more important to your daily life than the theology you claim to believe.

None of us ever gets to be in relationship with a finished person. God's redemptive work of change is ongoing in all our lives.

You and I will only be able to understand what is valuable when we examine things from the perspective of eternity.

He uses the difficult seasons in our relationships to allow us to see what we typically live for besides him.

The Christian life is a state of thankful discontent or joyful dissatisfaction. That is, I live every day thankful for the grace that has changed my life, but I am not satisfied. Why not? Because, when I look at myself honestly, I have to admit that I am not all I can be in Christ. I am thankful for the many things in my life that would not be there without his grace, but I will not settle for a partial inheritance!

If our heart's foundation is solid, based on God's truth, design, and purpose for us, we will be able to build healthy, God-honoring relationships even though we are flawed people living in a broken world. By contrast, broken community is always the result of broken foundations.

And each of us has tried to be the Holy Spirit in another person's life, trying to work spiritual changes that only God can accomplish.

Good relationships are built on a solid foundation. Without this foundation, no amount of hard work will make your relationships what God intended them to be.

Whenever you believe that the evil outside you is greater than the evil inside you, a heartfelt pursuit of Christ will be replaced by a zealous fighting of the "evil" around you. A celebration of the grace that rescues you from your own sin will be replaced by a crusade to rescue the church from the ills of the surrounding culture. Christian maturity becomes defined as a willingness to defend right from wrong. The gospel is reduced to participation in Christian causes.

God will take us where we have not planned to go in order to produce in us what we could not achieve on our own.

We say that the difficulty causes us to respond in sinful ways. But the Bible teaches again and again that our circumstances don't cause us to act as we do. They only expose the true condition of our hearts, revealed in our words and actions.

What God has begun in you, he will complete. Your destiny has already been decided. The One who decided it will give you all you need to get there.

One of the mistakes we make in handling God's Word is that we reduce it to a set of directions on how to live. We look for directions about relationships, church life, sex, finances, marriage, happiness, parenting, and so on. We mistakenly think that if we have clear directions we will be all right. But we keep getting lost! All the wise and precise directions given to us in Scripture haven't kept us from getting lost in the middle of our personal "big city.

No matter how you spin it, forgiveness is costly. Regardless of how big or small the offense, canceling a debt and absorbing the cost is going to hurt. But the parable shows us that not forgiving also has a price, and it is higher than the price forgiveness demands.

Everything God does and everything God calls us to only make sense from the perspective of eternity. If there is no end to the story, believers are a bunch of fools who need to be pitied. There is no reason for what we have tried to do. But there is a final chapter! God has opened it up so that we could look in and then look back to our lives with understanding and hope.

Repentance and faith must be your daily lifestyle. Why? Because it lays you low and lifts you up at the same time.

The one thing worth celebrating for all eternity is your redemption.

Very few people wake up one morning and decide to change their theology. Changes in a person's belief system are seldom that self-conscious.