If only 7 percent of the 2 billion Christians in the world would care for a single orphan in distress, there would effectively be no more orphans. If everybody would be willing to simply do something to care for one of these precious treasures, I think we would be amazed by just how much we could change the world.
I did nothing to deserve God's love; in fact, I was living as an orphan, without hope. Yet God chose to pursue a relationship with me, and through the death of his son Jesus, I was adopted into God's family.
There's nothing like a good cheating song to make me want to run home to be with my wife.
I think we all want to know that if our lives don't turn out the way we imagine, there's still a purpose.
This is life we've been given, made to be lived out, so... live out loud.
Cars are the reason we, you know, people live or die.
I am prone to reshape and refashion things to try and please as many people as I can, to get as many nods or smiles out of as many people as possible.
As Christians, our compassion is simply a response to the love that God has already shown us.
That's one wonderful thing about country music - it shifts, ebbs, and flows stylistically, unlike pop music.
Country music is just country. It's going to shift around a little bit, doing some different instrumentations, different production styles. But it will always come back to what you heard at the Opry. Nobody wants it to change.
Success breeds volume, and it's just amazing how many young writers, artists, and musicians there are in town.
I've been here 21 years, and I literally did walk up and down Music Row trying to break into the business. I felt very free to go into any publishing company.
I would hate to be a new artist or writer in town today. But somehow the cream continues to rise. If there's one who's great, he just jumps out of the pack like you can't believe.
I believe God weeps over - over death. Jesus wept at the grave the Lazarus. In the Bible, Jesus weeps at death.
I believe very confidently in the truth of Scripture, where it says that there is no authority, no power given to man except as given by God.
What God wants is to reveal himself more fully to us.
When I go to Africa and spend more time there with people who are the least of the least, those in desperate situations, I am broken by it. But I also find people with so much more joy and freedom living with nothing than I see walking down the streets of my own community here in Tennessee.
Writing songs out of my faith was a real natural progression. I grew up singing in my dad's choir and singing with my family. Christian music became the music that I identified myself with and was a way that I expressed my faith. Even at a public school I would take my Christian music in and play it for my friends.
I want to live with that sense with the music I make, with the art I make, with the way I love my kids, with the way I am a father and a husband and a friend and a follower of Christ, I want to live with reckless abandonment to the truth of the Gospel.
I've always been a rule-follower. Even when I was a kid, I tried to do everything by the book.
