New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional

by Paul David Tripp

It is one of the functional contradictions of sin. Even though sin somehow, some way reduces us all to fools, at the very same time it also convinces us that we are smarter than God. While we name ourselves as wise, we look at things that God does or things that he calls us to do as utterly foolish. How many people have said, “How could you ever worship a God who would _____?” How many people have wondered, “If God really loved me, why would he _____?” How many people have said, “I don’t see what’s so wrong with a little _____”? How many have asked, “Is _____ really that bad?” We really do have the ability to convince ourselves that we know what’s best and that we really don’t need wisdom greater than our own. I am convinced that most of us do this far more often than we think. We minimize the danger of what God calls dangerous, we question the need for the boundaries that God has set for us, and, in the face of our own sin, we argue that it’s not so bad after all. Every day in some situation or relationship, we are tempted to think that we are smarter than God. Without the rescue of God’s grace, we are all wise fools heading for danger we simply don’t see. So we eat more than we should while denying the physical, empirical evidence of our foolishness. We spend ourselves into hopeless debt and are surprised when we can no longer pay our bills. We live selfishly and judgmentally in relationships and then wonder why so much tension and distance exist between us. That’s why P...