Quotes from Timothy S. Lane

Do you need encouragement, comfort, hope, direction, wisdom, courage, rebuke, warning, forgiveness, patience, teaching, correction, thanks, insight, a job description, or something else? My words must be shaped by your need. An ambassador's words always address the person's true need of the moment.

My panic was about more than being overwhelmed in my responsibilities; it revealed a lack of trust in God. We can't move toward community with one another until we have been drawn into community with God.

The rest of this book is about hard work, but it is the best work you will ever do. If

Nothing is more obvious than the need for change. Nothing is less obvious than what needs to change and how that change happens.

Our hearts are so often captivated by paltry God-replacements that matter to us more than the true God. When we start to see this, it is the beginning of change and the pathway to freedom.

When we live out of 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.

My words must be shaped by your need. An ambassador's words always address the person's true need of the moment.

for a Christian whose hope is in an invisible God, seeing the unseen is essential. 24

Jesus is not a vending machine that dispenses what we want to feel good about ourselves. He is the Holy One who comes to cleanse us, fill us, and change us. He does not do this according to our agendas. He will not serve our wayward needs. He loves us too much to merely make us happy. He comes to make us holy. There will be many occasions when he will not give us what we think we need, but rather, he will give us what he knows we need.

And we have no more control over the not yet than we have had over the already.

God is not working for our comfort and ease; he is working on our growth. At the very moment we are tempted to question his faithfulness, he is fulfilling his redemptive promises to us. After all, it's not like there are only some people who really need to change. Change is the norm for everyone, and God is always at work to complete this process in us.

But the service Jesus rendered for us in his life, death, and resurrection is not just for forgiveness of sins or a future in heaven; it is also for the daily power to change in the present. We are not just promised life after death, but life before death! You can remember this as you face the realities of life in a broken world.

While the control of sin has been broken, the sin that remains in us still puts up a real fight.

No one ever said that conflict would be fun! But the Christian life is not always fun. That is not the most important thing to God. He is committed to something much bigger. His kingdom plan involves a total restoration of what he has made. He will settle for nothing less in his creation than to see that all things ultimately bring him glory.

Look at your life through the eyes of your Redeemer. Let him reveal your behavior and your heart as well. The courage of self-examination leads to the hope of lasting personal change when God is involved. Emmanuel has entered your story and nothing will ever be the same again!

Ambassadorial communication

Confronting a teenager five minutes before she leaves for school is not helpful, even if the content is accurate. Rebuking a friend for an offense in front of others is not helpful. Asking your husband to consider how you hurt him as he is trying to get to sleep is not helpful.

An ambassador seeks to speak the right thing in the best way.

we all must remember that our relationships have been designed as workrooms for redemption, not shelters for human happiness.

Remember, Father, Son, and Spirit were torn apart when Jesus died so that we might embrace rather than exclude one another. We have to be willing to face conflict. God wants us to grow and this is a crucial place where growth often occurs. He wants to make us more like Christ

While it may sound spiritual, the common practice of telling people to forget their lives over the past six days so that they can truly worship God for the next hour smacks more of Greek dualism than a biblical view of a spiritual person. Our lives over the past six days are what God is most interested in! A recognition of the Heat we all face will lead us to bring our messy lives before him.

The gospel gap in many of our lives doesn't stay empty either. If we do not live with a gospel-shaped, Christ-confident, and change-committed Christianity, that hole will get filled with other things. These things may seem plausible and even biblical, but they will be missing the identity-provision-process core that is meant to fill every believer.

the reality our imagination embraces is the reality we will live by. If we are not captured by the truth of living in a deeply personal relationship with God, we will shrink our expectations and dreams down to the size of our own selfish wants, desires, and strategies.

Relationships are costly, but so is avoiding them. If