Your approval before God is woven into the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, not what other men and women think about you.

If you are in Christ, you are fully and completely forgiven for all your sin-past, present and future.

We’ve been given the covenant community because we need each other, and together we’ll be more mature, experience more life, and know more joy than we ever would apart from one another.

The context of the gospel message is not our benefit or our salvation; the context of the gospel is the supremacy of Christ and the glory of God.

More often than not, we want him to have fairy wings and spread fairy dust and shine like a precious little star, dispensing nothing but good times on everyone, like some kind of hybrid of Tinker Bell and Aladdin’s Genie. But the God of the Bible, this God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, is a pillar of fire and a column of smoke.

The general confusion is that our moral behavior is what justifies us before God. Most of us would never say that with our mouths but we feel that lie in our heart and believe it in our minds. You can be morally upright and not be a worshipper of Christ at all.

Truly, God's plan of redemption is about more than me and you and our neighbor down the street. It's about men and women from every tribe, tongue, and nation on earth becoming a part of His covenant community.