I got my first tennis racket on my seventh birthday. And because we had a tennis court in our backyard, I played every day. By ten I was playing competitively.
Since Genesis 3 we have been addicted to setting our sights on something, someone, smaller than Jesus.
Legalism says God will love us if we change. The gospel says God will change us because He loves us.
The passive righteousness of faith frees me from passing final judgment on myself.
The gospel sets us free to become the romantic leaders of our marriages without fright or hesitation. Because we have been forever wooed by Jesus, we are now free to forever woo our wives.
What is indisputable is the fact that unbelief is the force that gives birth to all of our bad behavior and every moral failure. It is the root.
most people live their life as if their justification depends on their sanctification: if I do and become all that I must do and become, God will love me and accept me.
We make a big mistake when we conclude that the law is the answer to bad behavior. In fact, the law alone stirs up more of such behavior. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the law. To be...
Whether it's a Christian or a non-Christian, there's nothing like suffering to show us how small, needy, and not in control we are. Suffering has a way of sobering us up to the realization that we can...
The deepest fear we have, 'the fear beneath all fears,' is the fear of not measuring up, the fear of judgment. It's this fear that creates the stress and depression of everyday life.
Believe it or not, Christianity is not about good people getting better. If anything, it is good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good.
We often read the Bible as if it were fundamentally about us: our improvement, our life, our triumph, our victory, our faith, our holiness, our godliness.
Thankfully, while our self-righteousness reaches far, God's grace reaches farther.
My failure to lay aside the sin that so easily entangles is the direct result of my refusal to die to my natural proclivity toward attaining my own freedom, meaning, value, worth, and righteousness -...
When the Christian faith becomes defined by who we are and what we do and not by who Christ is and what he did for us, we miss the gospel - and we, ironically, become more disobedient.
God wants to free us from ourselves, and there's nothing like suffering to show us that we need something bigger than our abilities and our strength and our explanations.
The world tells us in a thousand different ways that the bigger we become, the freer we will be. The richer, the more beautiful, and the more powerful we grow, the more security, liberty, and happines...
The tragic irony in all of this is that when we focus so strongly on our need to get better, we actually get worse.
The good news of suffering is that it brings us to the end of ourselves - a purpose it has certainly served in my life. It brings us to the place of honesty, which is the place of desperation, which i...
An institution theoretically devoted to providing comfort to those in need (the church) is in trouble because it has embraced the same pressure cooker we find everywhere else.