When we consider the promises of Christ, risking everything we are and everything we have for His sake is no longer a matter of sacrifice. It's just common sense.

Jesus is not some puny religious teacher begging for an invitation from anyone. He is the all-sovereign Lord who deserves submission from everyone.

And while we stand with conviction and courage, we must live with compassion. Amid a world with massive social needs around us, ranging from desperate poverty and orphan crises and millions of girls being trafficked for sex, to the degradation of marriage and the abortion of babies, we need to speak and act with selfless love on all of these issues.

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

We desperately need each other in the daily fight to follow Christ in a world that's full of sin.

The key is realizing - and believing - that this world is not your home. If you and I ever hope to free our lives from worldly desires, worldly thinking, worldly pleasures, worldly dreams, worldly ideals, worldly values, worldly ambitions, and worldly acclaim, then we must focus our lives on another world.

We can rest confident in the fact that nothing will happen to us in this world apart from the gracious will of a sovereign God. Nothing.