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December 24, 2017
How our lives bear the fruit of Christ’s spilled blood is important.
Check out this quote.
Christians still scare me when they reduce Christianity to a lifestyle and claim that God is on the side of those who attend to the rules of the lifestyle they have invented or claim to find in the Bible.
It has always seemed to me that without the proper response to failure, we don’t grow, we only age.
Oh, how much aging I've experienced over a "proper response to failure."
There is a core difference between sharing the gospel with the lost and imposing a specific moral standard on the unconverted.
they talked with me in a way that didn’t make me feel erased.
Good teachers make it possible for people to change their positions without shame.
Amen!
I learned the first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin.
Wanting to understand is a theoretical statement; willing to do his will takes action.
I learned that we must obey in faith before we feel better or different. At this time, though, obeying in faith, to me, felt like throwing myself off a cliff. Faith that endures is heroic, not sentimental.
Biblical orthodoxy can offer real compassion, because in our struggle against sin, we cannot undermine God’s power to change lives.
How did the Lord heal me? The way that he always heals: the word of God got to be bigger inside me than I.
A habitus is a way of life that forms habits of the head, habits of the heart, and habits of the mind.
Undisciplined taste will always lead to egregious sin—slowly and almost imperceptibly.
Our hearts will become hard to the whispers of God if we turn our backs on those who have less than we do.
Modesty and discretion are not old-fashioned values. They are God’s standards that help us to encourage one another in good works, not covetousness.
Sexuality isn’t about what we do in bed. Sexuality encompasses a whole range of needs, demands, and desires. Sexuality is more a symptom of our life’s condition than a cause, more a consequence than an origin.
These passages also convicted me that homosexuality—like all sin—is symptomatic and not causal—that is, it tells us where our heart has been, not who we inherently are or what we are destined to become.
I learned that sin roots not in outward behaviors, but in patterns of thinking.
When you die to yourself, you have nothing from your past to use as clay out of which to shape your future.
Sin is not a mistake. A mistake is taking the wrong exit on the highway. A sin is treason against a Holy God. A mistake is a logical mis-step. Sin lurks in our heart and grabs us by the throat to do its bidding.
At the infinitesimal core of this failure resided something that I didn’t at first recognize. When I examined my feelings against the rugged Cross, I realized that this failure was wrapped in relief. Whatever was God’s providence for me, it was his to lay out and mine to obey. No longer did I have to invent myself.
Faith is not a feeling. Faith rides the waves of the treachery of life on the Christian worldview that you own. Faith and worldview are intimately intertwined. Our peace, love, courage, longsuffering, and life-works, lock-step with our Christian worldview and the faith that undergirds it.
Never again will I think of knowing God’s will as anything but the most humbling of acts. And never again will I confuse other people’s hopes and dreams for me as proof of God’s will.
“Unbelief puts circumstances between itself and Christ, so as not to see Him…Faith puts Christ between itself and circumstances, so that it cannot see them”
It is our own festering sin that takes the guise of innocence that will be the undoing of us all.
I didn’t choose Christ. Nobody chooses Christ. Christ chooses you or you’re dead. After Christ chooses you, you respond because you must. Period. It’s not a pretty story.
Marriage does not redeem sin. Only Jesus himself can do that.
The more God-centered our worship practice, the more mercy-centered our life.
