The way of God's grace becomes indispensable when we realize that the way of God's law is inflexible.
Our assurance is anchored in the love and grace of God expressed in the glorious exchange: our sin for His righteousness.
There's nothing like suffering to reveal how small and needy you are. Pain has the remarkable capacity to reveal the weakness of the things you're leaning on to make life worth living.
Disobedience happens not when we think too much grace but when we think too little of it
When I was 25, I believed I could change the world. At 41, I have come to the realization that I cannot change my wife, my church, or my kids, to say nothing of the world. Try as I might, I have not been able to manufacture outcomes the way I thought I could, either in my own life or other people's.
As long as I am focusing on the faults of others, then I don't have to face my own.
The Gospel announces that Jesus came to acquit the guilty. He came to judge and be judged in our place. Christ came to satisfy the deep judgment against us once and for all so that we could be free from the judgement of God, others, and ourselves.
When Martin Luther was asked what we contribute to our salvation, he said, "Sin and resistance"
When you don't have anything to lose, you discover something wonderful: you're free to take great risks without fear or reservation.
My struggle isn't believing my performance can earn God's favor; my struggle is believing my performance can keep God's favor
When God saved me, He gave me a thirst to learn and to read and to study. I thrived in college. I got a bachelor's degree in philosophy and then went to Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.
The hub of Christianity is not "do something for Jesus." The hub of Christianity is "Jesus has done everything for you".
When it comes to understanding and appreciating grace, our biggest problem is our so-called goodness...not our self-perceived badness.
God's grace meets us in messy places because messy places are all that there are.
Since Genesis 3 we have been addicted to setting our sights on something, someone, smaller than Jesus.
I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand why some Christians get mad when we say that the ultimate hero in the Bible is not Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Paul, etc... but Jesus.
Long-term, gospel-motivate d obedience can only come from the grace of what Jesus has already done, not the guilt of what we must do.
Our default faith mode is to trust, above all things, our own ability to create a safe, controllable, predictable world.
Grace is upside-down, to-do-list wrecking, scandalous and way-too free. It's one-way love.
The law is God's first word; the gospel is God's final word.
God is inviting you today to appropriately grieve your pains and losses and to acknowledge the world is seriously broken.
The only thing that frees you from the need to pretend in order to make people believe you are something when you are actually not is the gospel because the gospel tells you that identity, my meaning, my security, and all of those things are in Christ.
Performancism is the mindset that equates our identity and value directly with our performance and accomplishments.
I think there is tribalism is a big deal inside of the church, that the church thinks of themselves as a tribe and not a mission.
The pain cleared my vision, and once it was taken away, I realized just how much I'd been relying on the endorsement of others to make me feel like I mattered.
