New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional

by Paul David Tripp

Obedience is freedom. Better to follow the Master’s plan than to do what you weren’t wired to do—master yourself.

It is true that the thing that you and I most need to be rescued from is us! The greatest danger that we face is the danger that we are to ourselves. Who we think we are is a delusion and what we all tend to want is a disaster. Put together, they lead to only one place—death. If you’re a parent, you see it in your children. It didn’t take long for you to realize that you are parenting a little self-sovereign, who thinks at the deepest level that he needs no authority in his life but himself. Even if he cannot yet walk or speak, he rejects your wisdom and rebels against your authority. He has no idea what is good or bad to eat, but he fights your every effort to put into his mouth something that he has decided he doesn’t want. As he grows, he has little ability to comprehend the danger of the electric wall outlet, but he tries to stick his fingers in it precisely because you have instructed him not to. He wants to exercise complete control over his sleep, diet, and activities. He believes it is his right to rule his life, so he fights your attempts to bring him under submission to your loving authority. Not only does your little one resist your attempts to bring him under your authority, he tries to exercise authority over you. He is quick to tell you what to do and does not fail to let you know when you have done something that he does not like. He celebrates you when you submit to his desires and finds ways to punish you when you fail to submit to his demands. Now, here’s...

Because God rules all the places where you live, he is able to deliver his promises to you in the very circumstances where they are needed.

I don’t know whether you have ever thought of this before, but God’s promises are only as good as the extent of his sovereignty. He can deliver what you need only in the places where he rules. If his rule is not firm and unchanging, his promises are not either. I think that many of us fail to make this connection, and when we do, we allow ourselves to celebrate his promises while subtly resisting his rule. He is your sovereign Savior. If he were not sovereign, you would have no guarantee that he could exercise the authority necessary to be your Savior. Think for a moment about the flow of biblical history. Think of the many generations of people that existed between the fall of Adam and Eve and the birth of Jesus Christ. Think of the myriad situations and locations in that span of time. Think of all the human governments that rose and fell. Think of all the decisions, great and small, that people made. Think of the constant life-and-death cycle of the physical creation. Now consider this—in order for Jesus to be born as was promised, to live as was necessary, and to die and rise on our behalf as he said he would, God had to exercise absolute rule over the forces of nature and complete control over the events of human history so that, at just the right moment, Jesus would be born, live, die, and rise again for our redemption. Without the rule of the Almighty, there would’ve been no prophets predicting the birth of the Messiah, no angels announcing it to the shepherds, and n...

Here’s what you need to understand: only two types of glory exist—sign glory and ultimate glory. Sign glory is all the wondrous display of sights, sounds, colors, textures, tastes, smells, and experiences of the physical world that God created. These glories were not designed to satisfy your heart. They were not made to give you contentment, peace, meaning, and purpose. They have no capacity to give you life. Earth will never be your savior. Rather, all of creation was designed to be one big sign that points you to the One of ultimate glory who alone has the power to give you life and to satisfy your heart. God alone is able to give you life. He alone is able to give rest to your searching heart. He designed his world to point to him, not to replace him (see Psalm 19). Where will you look for life today? Will you live like the father having his vacation next to the sign along the highway or will you run to where the sign points? It really is true that your heart will only ever be satisfied when it finds its satisfaction in him.

We are often quick to anger and slow to love, but God is not like us. He’s slow to anger and abounding in love. You know the scene. You’ve rushed to the grocery store to get a few critical items your family needs. Your plan is to get in and out as quickly as is humanly possible. You sprint down the aisles and grab your stuff, then run to the checkout lines, only to discover that the self-serve lanes are closed for repair and only one clerk is working. Just as you reach her lane, a woman pulls in front of you with a cart of 150 items. You can feel your chest tighten. It’s not enough that she slowly reexamines every item as she puts it on the belt, but after emptying her cart she pulls out 120 coupons that have to be cross-checked with the corresponding grocery items. You’re beginning to get angry. Finally her quest to save every last penny is over, but then she discovers that she has to pay. It’s as if it’s a fresh concept to her. Until this point, she has made no move toward her purse, which is about the size of a camping tent for six. As she begins to pull makeup, cookies, and small children out of her purse, you bellow, “Come on, are you kidding me?” As everyone at the front of the store turns to look at you, you realize you said it louder than you planned. Examine the moment with me. You are livid at this woman, but she didn’t purposefully delay you. You are seething, but you have lost only ten minutes out of your day. You’re incensed, but the whole thing is ridiculousl...

Galatians 2:20 captures who you are as a child of God and what you have been given so well: 1. A statement of redemptive-historical fact. “I have been crucified with Christ.” What Paul is saying here is hugely important. On the cross of Calvary, Jesus didn’t purchase general savability. He didn’t die to make salvation possible. No, Jesus took names to the cross. He specifically and effectively died for you and me. His death was just as effective for us as if we had died ourselves. Because he died as our representative, his death satisfied God’s anger against us, so that we face it no more. 2. A statement of present redemptive reality. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” This is radical and hard to grasp, but important to consider. You and I died with Christ so that he could live within us now. Paul’s not talking about physical life here, but spiritual. The power that now animates, motivates, and propels your spiritual life is not you, but Christ! By grace, he makes you the place where he dwells. This means you are never in a situation, location, or relationship by yourself. He is always with you. And because he is always with you, you are never left to the limited resources of your own wisdom, strength, and righteousness (see Eph. 3:20–21). 3. The life-shaping result. “The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” I place my faith in the fact of his death for me and his life within me, and I...

The counsel of John is clear and just as important today as when he penned the words: Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. (1 John 2:15–17) You are a lover; we all are. We love. It’s what human beings do every moment of every day, in every location, and in every situation. You are never not loving. It’s in the very fiber of your being. It’s the way God carefully constructed you. Why did he hardwire you to love? Why is this such an essential part of who you are? God created you with this capacity so that you would have what you need to live in a deeply loving, heart-controlling, motivation-producing, worship-initiating, joy-stimulating relationship with him. Your capacity to love was created for him. Your desire to love was meant to draw you to him. Your heart was designed to long for love, and that longing was meant to find its final and complete fulfillment in him. Here is the tragedy. Sin causes us all, in some way, to turn our backs on the love of God and give the principal love of our hearts to someone or something else. We seek to have our hearts fulfilled by love for something other than God. We love the creation more than the Creator. We love ot...

You see, God, who is love, sent the Son of his love to make the ultimate sacrifice of love so that we would become people who love him as we have never loved him before. In love, he showers us with love that does not quit even on our most unloving day. And by grace, he transforms our hearts so that increasingly we are able to keep creation in its proper place and keep the ultimate love of our hearts for him and him alone. Now celebrate the gift of that rescuing love!

It’s not natural for us to think about our lives in this way, but the difficulties we all face in this broken world are not in the way of God’s plan. No, they are part of it. The fallen world that is your address is not your address because he didn’t think through his redemptive plan very well. You are living where you’re living and facing what you’re facing because that’s exactly how God wanted it to be. The hardships that we all face between the “already” and the “not yet” are not a sign of the failure of God’s redeeming work, but rather a very important tool of it. What we are all going through right here, right now is a massive, progressive process of values clarification and heart protection. God is daily employing the brokenness of this present world to clarify your values. Why do you need this? You need it because you struggle in this life to remember what is truly important, that is, what God says is important. You and I place much more importance on things than they truly possess, and when we do so, these things begin to claim our heart allegiance. So God ordains for us to experience that physical things get old and break. The people in our lives fail us. Relationships sour and become painful. Our physical bodies weaken. Flowers die and food spoils. All of this is meant to teach us that these things are beautiful and enjoyable, but they cannot give us what we all long for—life. In this world that is groaning, God is protecting our hearts. He is protecting us from ...

If you are God’s child, you’re either giving in to sin or giving way to the operation of rescuing grace, but your heart’s never neutral.

One of the beautiful results of God’s redeeming grace in your life and mine is that the hearts of stone have been taken out of us and replaced with hearts of flesh. Think of the word picture here. If I had a stone in my hands and I pressed it with all of my might, what do you think would happen? Well, if you could see the size of my arms, you would immediately know the answer to the question. I could press that stone with all of the strength that I have and nothing whatsoever would happen. Stone is not malleable. It exists in a fixed shape. Before your conversion, you had that kind of heart. It was resistant to change. But that is not true any longer. Grace has given you a fleshy heart, one that is moldable by transforming grace. Now, this means that when you sin, desiring, thinking, saying, or doing what is wrong in God’s eyes, your conscience bothers you. What we’re talking about here is the convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit. When your conscience bothers you, you have only two choices. You can gladly confess that what you’ve done is sin and place yourself once again under the justifying mercies of Christ, or you can erect some system of self-justification that makes what God says is wrong acceptable to your conscience. We are all so good at doing this. We are good at pointing to something or someone who justifies what we have done. We are all very good at systems of self-atonement that essentially argue for our righteousness. What is deadly about this is that when y...

The cross is evidence that in the hands of the Redeemer, moments of apparent defeat become wonderful moments of grace and victory.

At the center of a biblical worldview is this radical recognition—the most horrible thing that ever happened was the most wonderful thing that ever happened. Consider the cross of Jesus Christ. Could it be possible for something to happen that was more terrible than this? Could any injustice be greater? Could any loss be more painful? Could any suffering be worse? The only man who ever lived a life that was perfect in every way possible, who gave his life for the sake of many, and who willingly suffered from birth to death in loyalty to his calling was cruelly and publicly murdered in the most vicious of ways. How could it happen that the Son of Man could die? How could it be that men could capture and torture the Messiah? Was this not the end of everything good, true, and beautiful? If this could happen, is there any hope for the world? Well, the answer is yes. There is hope! The cross was not the end of the story! In God’s righteous and wise plan, this dark and disastrous moment was ordained to be the moment that would fix all the dark and disastrous things that sin had done to the world. This moment of death was at the same time a moment of life. This hopeless moment was the moment when eternal hope was given. This terrible moment of injustice was at the very same time a moment of amazing grace. This moment of extreme suffering guaranteed that suffering would end one day, once and for all. This moment of sadness welcomed us to eternal joy of heart and life. The capture ...

Worshiping with other believers helps you view all of life from the vantage point of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

It’s not just the most important miracle ever. It’s not just the most astounding event in the life of the Messiah. It’s not just an essential item in your theological outline. It’s not just the reason for the most important celebratory season of the church. It’s not just your hope for the future. No, the resurrection is all that and more. It is also meant to be the window through which you view all of life. Second Corinthians 4:13–15 captures this truth very well: “[We know] that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.” But what does it look like to look at life through the window of the resurrection? As I assess my life right here, right now, what about the resurrection must I remember? Let me suggest five things. 1. The resurrection of Jesus guarantees your resurrection too. Life is not a constantly repeating cycle of the same old same old. No, under God’s rule this world is marching toward a conclusion. Your life is being carried to a glorious end. There will be a moment when God will raise you out of this broken world, and sin and suffering will be no more. 2. The resurrection tells you what Jesus is now doing. Jesus now reigns. First Corinthians 15 says that he will continue to reign until the final enemy is under his feet. You see, your world is not out of control, but under the ca...

Prayer is abandoning my addiction to other glories and delighting in the one glory that is truly glorious—the glory of God. Sadly, prayer for many of us has been shrunk to an agenda that is little bigger than asking God for stuff. It has become that spiritual place where we ask God to sign our personal wish lists. For many, it is little more than a repeated cycle of requesting, followed by waiting to see if God, in fact, comes through. If he does, we celebrate his faithfulness and love; but if he doesn’t, we not only wonder if he cares, we are also tempted to wonder if he’s there. In this way, prayer often amounts to shopping at the Trinitarian department store for things that you have told yourself you need with the hope that they will be free. But consider the Lord’s Prayer for a moment. It doesn’t look anything like what I’ve just described. This prayer is a prayer of worship and surrender. It recognizes, at the deepest level, the war that still goes on in my heart between the kingdom of self and the kingdom of God. It faces the fact that I can be so blind to the glory of God, and as I am, I become captured by the small glories of the created world. It does more surrendering and celebrating than it does asking. And the asking that it does is in the context not of self-glory wishing, but rather in the context of submission and worship. How does this prayer begin? It begins by reminding you of the most astounding reality of your life. It begins with a celebration of grace...

Now, because you are a sinner, it is very tempting to give the love and worship that you were meant to give to God and God alone to something in the creation (see Rom. 1:22–25). You take the affection, submission, and service of your heart that was meant to be reserved for the Creator and you place it on some created thing. We all do this in some way. So the desire for good possessions is not wrong, but it must not rule your heart. The hunger for comfort and ease is not ungodly in itself, but it must not rule your heart. The desire for the love of another person is not wrong, but it must not rule your heart. A desire for even a good thing becomes a bad thing when that desire becomes a ruling thing. Good things never result when love for and worship of the Creator are replaced by love for and worship of created things. So what does grace do? Grace works to rescue you from you by progressively breaking your bondage to the created world and turning the deepest affection of your heart toward God. God alone is worthy of your worship. God alone is able to satisfy and bring peace to your heart. This work of rescue is not yet complete in any of us. Yes, by grace we love the world less than we once did and we surely love God more than before, but our hearts are still torn and our loyalties at points are still confused. But we need not fret, because grace will win and bring final rest to our worship and our love.

So your weaknesses are not the big danger that you should fear. What you should really fear are your delusions of strength. When you tell yourself that you are strong, you quit being excited about God’s rescuing, transforming, and empowering grace. Paul actually celebrated his weaknesses, because as he did, the power of God rested upon him. He didn’t live a fearful, discouraged, and envious life; he was content because he knew weakness is the doorway to real power, power that only God can and willingly does supply.

Who in the world do you think you are? I’m serious. Who do you think you are? You and I are always assigning to ourselves some kind of identity. And the things that you and I do are shaped by the identity that we have given ourselves. So it’s important to acknowledge that God has not just forgiven you (and that is a wonderful thing), but he has also given you a brand-new identity. If you’re God’s child, you are now a son or daughter of the King of kings and the Lord of lords. You are in the family of the Savior, who is your friend and brother. You are the temple where the Spirit of God now lives. Yes, it really is true—you’ve been given a radically new identity. The problem, sadly, is that many of us live in a constant, or at least a rather regular, state of identity amnesia. We forget who we are, and when we do, we begin to give way to doubt, fear, and timidity. Identity amnesia makes you feel poor when in fact you are rich. It makes you feel foolish when in fact you are in a personal relationship with the One who is wisdom. It makes you feel unable when in fact you have been blessed with strength. It makes you feel alone when in fact, since the Spirit lives inside of you, it is impossible for you to be alone. You feel unloved when in fact, as a child of the heavenly Father, you have been graced with eternal love. You feel like you don’t measure up when in fact the Savior measured up on your behalf. Identity amnesia sucks the life out of your Christianity in the right her...

God’s story has a beginning and an end that never ends, and if you’re God’s child, his story is now your biography. Wow!

You’re probably like me—you like a good story. Whether it’s a TV drama, a box-office hit movie, or a million-seller novel, we tend to line up for the good story. Or maybe you’re sitting in a restaurant or around a campfire, and your friends begin to tell stories. Each one seems better than the one before. It begins to feel a bit like a contest. It seems as if people are trying to “outstory” one another. So you begin to thumb through your mental catalog of personal stories to see if you are carrying one that may just win the day. Or maybe someone tells you a fantastic story and you can’t wait for the opportunity to retell it to someone else. Yep, we all love a good story. Now, most great stories are great because, through myriad characters, relationships, situations, and locations, they march you to an incredible ending. When someone is talking to you about a great movie he just saw or a great book he just read, he often says, “And you will just not believe the ending!” But the best story ever conceived, written, and acted out in real life is the best story precisely because it has no ending. 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 grasp and th...

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? Paul is arguing that God’s gift of and sacrifice of his Son is your guarantee that he will grace you with every good thing you need until you are finally free of this broken world and with him forever in eternity. You do not have to wonder about God’s presence or his care. 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.

Since my need for spiritual help is so great, the Bible teaches that I need the daily intervention of the body of Christ.

It really is true—your walk with God is a community project. The isolated, separated, loner, Jesus-and-me religion that often marks modern church culture is not the religion that is described in the New Testament. Many of us live virtually unknown, and many of the people whom we think we know we don’t actually know. Many of us live in endless networks of terminally casual relationships, in which conversations seldom go deeper than weather, food, politics, the coolest movie that’s out, or the latest cute thing your child did. Most of what we call fellowship never really rises to the level of the humble self-disclosure and mutual ministry that make fellowship actually redemptively worthwhile. Most of what we call fellowship is little different from what happens at the pub down the street. We should just call it “pubship” and tell people that they don’t have to worry, there will be little fellowship at the church dinner. Hebrews 3:12–13 addresses the essentiality of community to the work that God has done and is continuing to do in you and me: “Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” Why do I need the daily intervention of the body of Christ? The answer is as simple as it is humbling. I need this daily ministry because I am a blind man. As much as I would like to thi...

What could comfort you more than these words: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10)?

Everybody searches for life somewhere. God has placed this quest in each of our hearts. It is there to drive us to him. It is there because we were made for him. But sadly, in their lifelong quest for life, most people ignore God. In their God amnesia, they look for life where it cannot be found, and because they do, they always come up empty. It’s important to realize that you can search for life in only two places. Either you have found life to the fullest vertically or you are shopping for it horizontally. This is a major piece of what Paul is writing about in Romans 1:25 when he says: “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” What is that lie? It is the lie that was first told in the garden of Eden—the false promise that life, heart-satisfying life, could be found somewhere outside the Creator. It is the lie of lies, the cruelest lie ever told. If you believe it, it will not only leave you empty and discouraged, but it will set your life on a course of destruction. 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. He alone is a...

Faith means you take God at his word, you never let yourself think that you’re smarter than him, and you live inside his boundaries.

Faith so completely takes God at his word that it is willing to do what he says and stay inside his boundaries. Faith is a response of your heart to God that completely alters the way you live your life. You don’t just think by faith; you live by faith. Now, it is important to face two implications of real, living faith. 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, and submit to his rules. We tend to live by sight, by personal experience, by collective research, or by good old intuition, but faith isn’t natural. It’s natural to give yourself to wonderment about mysteries in your life you’ll never solve. It’s natural to imagine where you’ll be in ten or twenty years. It’s natural to wonder why someone else’s life has turned out so very different from yours. It’s natural to panic at moments, wondering if God really does exist and, if he does, if he hears your prayers. 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. You and I have all the power in the world to doubt and no independent power at all to believe. So if you are living by faith, don’t proudly pat yourself on the back as if you did something great. No, raise your eyes and your hands toward heaven and thank God for gifting you with the desire and ability to believe. Second, pa...

You have no reason for fear when you answer God’s call; you have every reason to be afraid when you put your life in your own hands.

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 always best and what he requires is always good. When he calls, he goes with you. What he calls you to do, he empowers by his grace. When he guides, he protects. He stands with power and faithfulness behind every one of his promises. He has never failed to deliver anything that he has promised. There is simply no risk in answering the call of the King of kings.

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. Only grace can work to remind us that faith in God is a resting place and trust in self is a minefield. It is grace and grace alone that empowers us to follow and to rest.

It is grace to not be paralyzed by regret. The cross teaches that you are not stuck, not cursed to pay forever for your past.

He sat before me with his head in his hands and kept saying over and over again: “I just wish I could have it all back. I just wish I could press a button and do it all over again. I wish I knew then what I know now. I wish I could try again, but I can’t.” He must have said this or something similar to this ten times. He was incredibly distraught and regretful, and yet in the best spiritual condition he had ever been in. I really did feel his pain and I was very happy that he felt it too, because I knew that what he was experiencing was the pain of grace. He was a hard, driven, and demanding man who kept moving forward no matter what and never looked back. He didn’t care what trail of destruction he left behind him. He was successful. He knew it and wanted everyone else to know it too. He had loved his work more than his family, and in the process, he had lost both. It was all gone—family, job, and wealth. He had played the game by himself and for himself, and had lost in a big way. But now his eyes were open, and the scene broke his heart. Bankrupt and alone, he looked back with grief at every arrogant moment. It was painful, but it was grace. God was making his eyes see so that he would never go back there again. It’s a grace to regret. Grace allows you to face your sin, to own it and not shift the blame. But it is also grace that forgives what has been exposed. Grace forces you to feel the pain of your regrets, but never asks you to pay for them, because the price has a...

Grace doesn’t make it okay for you to live for you. No, grace frees you to experience the joy of living for One greater than you.

It is universally true that what seems to us to be freedom isn’t really freedom after all. When Adam and Eve stepped outside of God’s boundaries, they didn’t step into freedom. They stepped into toil, temptation, suffering, sin, and bondage. Denying God’s existence, desiring his place, ignoring his rules, and determining to make it on your own might seem like pathways to freedom, but they never, ever are. You and I weren’t designed to live independently. We weren’t meant to live in our own strength. We weren’t created to rely on our own wisdom. We weren’t given the ability to write our own moral codes. We weren’t put together with the independent knowledge of how to live, how to steward the physical world, or how to properly relate to one another. We were not created to live by ourselves or for ourselves, and to attempt to do so never leads anywhere good. So as God blesses us and changes us with his grace, the result isn’t a greater ability to live an independent life; the opposite is true. Grace doesn’t free us to live for us. 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). True freedom is never found in putting yourself at the center, with your choices and behavior shaped by y...

So here’s the humbling and comforting truth of the gospel. Your obedience doesn’t initiate anything. Your obedience and mine only occur because God initiated a redemptive process that resulted in our forgiveness and transformation. We don’t obey to get his favor; we obey because his favor has fallen on us and transformed our hearts, giving us the willingness and power to obey. God’s work of rescue and forgiveness didn’t begin just before you first believed. It didn’t begin just before you were born. It began before the world was born. He placed his grace on you and wrote your story in such a way that at a certain point in time you would hear the truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ and believe. His love for you is never a result of your character; it is a clear demonstration of his. He granted you and me what we never could have deserved; our new life is his choice, his gift. This means that if you obey him for a thousand years, you will have no more of his favor than when you first believed. Now, that truly is grace!

The message is consistent throughout all of these passages. God is not working to deliver to you your personal definition of happiness. If you’re on that agenda page, you are going to be disappointed with God and you are going to wonder if he loves you. God is after something better—your holiness, that is, the final completion of his redemptive work in you. The difficulties you face are not in the way of God’s plan, they do not show the failure of God’s plan, and they are not signs he has turned his back on you. No, those tough moments are a sure sign of the zeal of his redemptive love.

As God’s child, there’s never a moment when you’re not under God’s care, never a time when you’re not the object of his love.

The big question is not, does God care for me? The Bible declares he does over and over again. It tells us that God’s eyes are on the righteous and his ears are open to their prayers (Ps. 34:15). It says that he is with us wherever we go (Gen. 28:15). The Bible welcomes us to bring our cares to God because he cares for us (1 Pet. 5:7). It tells us that he will never leave us or forsake us (Heb. 13:5). The message is clear and consistent—God cares for his own. If you are God’s child, you are never outside the scope of his constant care. The Bible is also clear and consistent when it talks of the unshakability of God’s love. His love is eternal. From the verse-by-verse refrain of Psalm 136, “for his steadfast love endures forever,” to Paul’s declaration in Romans 8 that nothing can separate us from the “love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (v. 39), the message is undebatable—God will never turn from the love he has lavished on us. So if you’re God’s child, you’re wasting your spiritual time and energy worrying about God’s love. You’re not spending your time well if you’re trying to unpack little moments in your life to see if they are an indication of whether he loves you. It’s not wise to compare your life to another person’s, wondering what the evidence tells you about who God cares for the most. It is tempting to do all of these things, particularly when life is hard, when unpredictable and difficult things have entered your door. But questioning God’s love never goes an...

Something else needs to be said. If the big question isn’t whether God cares, then maybe the real question, one that is more practical to us all, is, will I recognize God’s care when it comes? Perhaps our problem is our definition and expectation of God’s care. You see, God’s care comes in a variety of packages. His care is not always a cool drink and a soft pillow. God’s care is not always relief from circumstances, release from trouble. There are many moments in our lives when the very thing that causes us to wonder about God’s care is his care. He knows that trouble will reveal our hearts or display his glory. Often trouble is a tool of care in the hands of the One who knows best what we need. He cares; therefore, make sure your definition of his care is not too narrow.

Since God writes your story, he knows what you’re facing and exactly what grace you’ll need to live his way.

Admit it: your life hasn’t worked out according to your plan. Last month didn’t work out according to your plan. Today won’t work out according to your plan. All of this is true because you aren’t the author of your story. You don’t need to read a mystery novel; your life is a mystery to you. 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. But even though there is very little that we know for sure about our lives and we experience constant surprises along the way, we need not give way to panic. 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 God is the Author of every detail of your story, 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. You could say it this way: his sovereign control is the guarantee that you will have everything that he has promised you. His sovereign control means he knows what you need because he has planned for you everything that you’re now facing. But more needs to be said. His sovereignty is your surety because he can guarantee the delivery of his promises only in the location where he rules. Because he rules over all things at all times (since he wrote the sto...

Today you will spend solitary moments of conversation with yourself, either listing your complaints or counting your blessings.

Think with me for a moment. Do you live a life of blessing or complaint? It is so easy to grumble. 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, we all still tend to shrink our worlds down to the small confines of our wants, our needs, and our feelings. We then tend to judge the good of our lives by how much of what we want we are able to actually have. At street level, it is tempting to live a God-forgetful, me-istic existence. If you put yourself in the center of your world, you will find plenty of things to complain about. 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. In some way, the fallenness of your world enters your door every day. Combine the hardships of life in this fallen world with the self-centeredness of sin and you have a recipe for disaster, or at least a miserable life of discontent. The Bible does not see grumbling and complaini...

If you have quit being defensive and are now willingly and humbly approachable, you know that transforming grace has visited you.

It started in the garden of Eden, and we have been committed to it ever since. 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. Yes, it is true: there have been generations and generations of finger pointers ever since. You see, when you’ve done something wrong, it’s not natural to look inside yourself for the cause. Sin makes us all shockingly self-righteous. It makes us all committed self-excusers. 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. We are all very skilled at presenting the logic of the argument that what we have done says more about the flawed people and dysfunctional things around us than it does about us. When our consciences bother us because of the faithful convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit, we are all tempted to dodge blame by locating the cause elsewhere. We all tend to be much more concerned about the sin of others than we are about our own, but, John says, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). Because accepting blame is not natural, it takes rescuing, transforming grace to produce a humble, willing, broken, self-examining, help-seeking heart. Only divine grace can softe...

Your hope is not in your ability to love God, but in his unrelenting and unshakable love for you.

So your hope in life and death is never to be found in the degree of your love for God. It is only ever found in the magnitude of his love for you. This love is yours as a gift of his grace even on those days where your heart has run after other lovers. That’s just how beautiful and faithful his love for you really is.