We have a dangerous tendency to misunderstand, minimize, and even manipulate the gospel in order to accommodate our assumptions and our desires.

No matter how many red Xs we write on our hands to end slavery, as long as these same hands are clicking on pornographic websites and scrolling through sexual pictures and videos, we are frauds to the core.

I want to be apart of something that can only be explained by the hand of God!

Surely the gospel evokes unconditional surrender of all that we are and all that we have to all that He is.

Do you and I believe him (Christ) enough to obey him and to follow him wherever he leads, even when the crowds in our culture - and maybe in our churches - turn the other way?...For the sake of an increasingly marginalized and relatively ineffective church in our culture, I want to risk it all. For the sake of my life, my family, and the people who surround me, I want to risk it all.

In our evil we rebel against God. We take the law of God, written in his Word and on our hearts, and we disobey it.

So the challenge for us is to live in such a way that we are radically dependent on and desperate for the power that only God can provide.