Todd Burpo Quotations

As a pastor and as a dad, I want my son to know I tell the truth. He can read the book. He knows if I exaggerated or if I didn't. My son is forever gonna believe that I'm an honest person or I'm a liar by what I wrote in that book, because he can read.

The Bible's been attacked. What is truth? It's relative.

Jesus clearly viewed children as precious - and that if he loved kids enough to say that adults should be more like them, we should spend more time loving them too.

Like an engineer understands a car he or she designed, no one understands your limitations and possibilities better than the God who created you.

How do you scare some sense into a child who doesn’t fear death?

It is the opposite of ignorance—it is intellectual honesty: to be willing to accept reality and to call things what they are even when it is hard.

When God does a miracle somehow you have to respond. When God does things for you - maybe we don't deserve them and we can never really repay God but God really wants us to respond to them. He doesn't want us to stay the same. So, for us to respond to what God has done in our lives is probably the same way he would want anyone to do - "Just tell people what I've done for you and what you've seen and heard." That's what we're doing.

In a boxing match, the fighters absorb some vicious blows because they’re ready for them. And usually, the knockout punch is the one they didn’t see coming.

Sometimes laughter is the only way to process tough times

I'd once heard a spiritual "riddle" that went like this: "What's the only thingin heaven that's the same as it was on earth?"The answer: the wounds in Jesus' hands and feet.

I think sometimes we think faith is about having all the answers. It isn't. But (it's) the thing that keeps you steady and in peace in the midst of storms.

Is heaven a hope or as real as the earth and sky?

It's fun to talk about heaven, about the throne of God and Jesus and Pop and the daughter we thought we had lost but will meet again someday. But it's not fun to talk about how we got there.

A friend of ours, the wife of a pastor at a church in Colorado, had once told me about something her daughter, Hannah, said when she was three years old. After the morning service was over one Sunday, Hannah tugged on her mom's skirt and asked. "Mommy, why do some people in church have lights over their heads and some don't?" At the time, I remember thinking two things: First, I would've knelt down and asked Hannah, "Did I have a light over my head? Please say yes!" I also wondered what Hannah had seen, and whether she had seen it because, like my son, she had a childlike faith.

Being a pastor, of course, obviously people would say it (shouldn't) have done much but, boy, it sure gave me a peace I never had before. I think we struggle in life. Even people of faith struggle when things don't work out quite the way we think they should.

What is childlike humility? It’s not the lack of intelligence, but the lack of guile. The lack of an agenda.

...when I was angry at God because I couldn't go to my son, hold him, and comfort him, God's son was holding my son in his lap.

You might as well tell God what you think. He already knows it anyway.