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Are you tired of the futility and frustration of this broken world? Are you exhausted by sin, suffering, and death? Are you burdened with the pain that lives inside you and outside you? At times, do you wonder if anyone knows, if anyone...
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hymn and this encouraging passage from the final book of the Bible are for you. Your Redeemer knows. Your Redeemer understands. Your Redeemer cares. His grace has been unleashed and its work will not be done until every last sin-broken thing has been fully an...
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The one story you need to know, understand, and give your heart to is hopeful, encouraging, and life-transforming because it offers you the two wonderful things that no other story can offer you. First, it offers you a place in the story, a place that was planned for you long before the story was written. But it also offers you something that is hard for the human brain to
It offers you life that never, ever ends.
You can rest in God’s care. If he freely offered up his Son for you, will he forget you now?
Now, it simply defies redemptive logic to allow yourself at any moment in your life to think that God would go to the extent that he has gone to provide you with salvation and then lose you along the way. If he controlled nature and history so that at the right time Jesus came to live,
die, and rise again on your behalf; if he worked by grace to expose you to the truth and gave you the heart to believe; and if he now works to bring the events of the universe to a final glorious conclusion, does it make any sense to think that he would fail to provide you with everything you need between your conversion and your final resurrection?
You do not have to fear that he will leave you on your own. You do not have to wonder if he will be there for you in your moment of need. When you give way to these fears, you commit an act of gospel irrationality. If he gave you Jesus, he will give you along with him everything you need.
The physical, created world is full of engaging and entertaining delights, but it is important to understand that nothing in the physical world can give you the life that your heart longs for. The delights of the physical world were carefully crafted to point to the One who alone is able to give your heart eternal delight. God alone is able to bring the deepest of joy and contentment to your heart.
Again today, he promises you life. It’s what he came to live, die, and rise again to give you. That empty tomb not only means he has conquered death, but it tells you he has life in his
hands, the kind of life all human beings were designed to long for whether they know it or not. You can’t find or earn that life on your own. It is yours only by means of the work of another.
Faith so completely takes God at his
word that it is willing to do what he says and stay inside his boundaries.
First, faith is simply never natural for us. We aren’t born with faith in God. We don’t come out of the womb ready to acknowledge his existence, worship him for his glory,
But putting your entire existence in the hands of One whom you cannot see, touch, or hear is far from natural. This is why faith is only ever a gift of divine grace.
participating in formal Christianity is a part of a life of faith, but it does not define the life of faith.
So look into the mirror of Hebrews 11 and examine your faith. You don’t need to do that fearfully, anxious at what you’ll see. You don’t need to deny the reality of your spiritual struggle or act as if you’re something that you’re not. You don’t have to fear exposure, because your struggle of faith has been more than
adequately addressed by the grace of the cross of the Lord Jesus.
Each moment of fear, each act of refusal, was an act of spiritual irrationality. Each fearful person had been invited to be part of the massive history- and globe-spanning work of the kingdom of God. The One who called them created the world and holds it together by his will. He has power over all things spiritual and
physical. He rules every situation, location, and relationship in which his call is to be followed.
He is amazing in his wisdom, abundant in his grace, and boundless in his love. He is saving, forgiving, transforming, and delivering. What he says is alway...
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What is incredibly dangerous is how quickly we forget God and how fast our allegiance to our own purposes and plans develops. We convince ourselves that we are wiser, stronger, and more righteous than we really are, and therefore we step into danger.
Eve stepped outside of God’s boundaries, they didn’t step into freedom. They stepped into toil, temptation, suffering, sin, and bondage.
The purpose of God’s grace is not to make your little kingdom of one work better. The purpose of God’s grace is to free you from your slavery to you so that you can live for a much, much better kingdom: “And he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Cor. 5:15).
I was created to live in worshipful and obedient dependency on God, and when grace restores me to that place, it also gives me back my freedom.
You and I don’t have a clue what is around the next corner, let alone where we will be and what we will be doing a decade from now.
Yes, our lives are out of our control, but that doesn’t mean they are out of control. No, our lives are under the careful administration of the One who had the wisdom and power to be the great Author of it all.
since he writes into your story every situation, location, and relationship, then he knows exactly what you’re facing and precisely what grace you need to face it in the way he has planned.
His sovereign control means he knows what you need because he has planned for you everything that you’re now facing.
He reminds us that because God is involved with every detail of our lives, he is near.
It is so easy to find fault. It is so easy to be discontent. It is so easy to find things that are less than you want them to be. It is so easy to be irritated and impatient. It is so easy to groan and moan about the difficulties of life. It is so easy to be dissatisfied. Why are these things so easy? Well, they’re easy because sin still causes us to make it all about us. Because sin really is selfishness at its core,
It is also true that you live in a fallen world where people and things are not functioning the way God
intended. This world really is terribly broken. Life here really is hard. You face all kinds of difficulties, big and small. People disappoint you. They make your life hard. Obstacles appear in your way.
Combine the hardships of life in this fallen world with the self-centeredness of sin and you have a recipe for disaster, or at l...
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The joy or complaint of your heart always shapes your willingness
to trust God and to do his will.
Complaining forgets Go...
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It ignores his presence. It fails to see the beauty of his promises. It allows the display of his splendor in creation to go unnoticed. It questions his goodness, faithfulness, and...
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Our readiness to complain is another argument for the forgiving and rescuing grace that Jesus, without complaint, willingly died to give us.
We all point the finger of blame and we all work to convince ourselves that the party to blame is not us. Adam pointed his finger at Eve, and Eve pointed her finger at the Serpent; neither one of them accepted blame.
when you’ve done something wrong, it’s not natural to look inside yourself for the cause.
Somehow, some way, we all buy into the delusion that our biggest problems live outside us, not inside us. We all have very active inner lawyers, who rise to our defense in the face of any accusation of wrong.
Because accepting blame is not natural, it takes rescuing, transforming grace to produce a
humble, willing, broken, self-examining, help-seeking heart.
Only grace can cause you to quit pointing your finger and to run to your Redeemer for his forgiveness and delivering power.
Only grace can cause us to put our hope in the only place where hope can be found—in God and God alone.
we look down on others, failing to see them with eyes of compassion and hearts of mercy.
1 John 4:20: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” Wow! There it is.
If I have such a struggle loving the people around me, how great and deep must be my struggle to love God?
we still write our own rules, we still love our kingdoms more than we love his, we still demand what we don’t deserve, and we still question God’s goodness when we don’t get out own way. We all fall into doing these things because we just do not love God as we should. We tend to love ourselves and we tend to love the world, but very often the love of the Father simply is not in us. So your hope in life and death is
