God is the ultimate musician. His music transforms your life. The notes of redemption rearrange your heart and restore your life. His songs of forgiveness, grace, reconciliation, truth, hope, sovereignty, and love give you back your humanity and restore your identity.

Embedded in the larger story of redemption is a principle we must not miss: God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things in the lives of others.

Grace will expose the deepest issues of your heart, then point you to the Cross which covers everything that's been exposed.

Harboring bitterness against people is actually confessing their sin to myself, over and over again. Anger is akin to confessing their sin to God, dissatisfied that he hasn't done something and placing myself in his position as judge.

Human self-righteousness denies the need for the saving, enabling grace of Christ. Human righteousness embraces the cruelest of Satan's lies, that a person can be righteous by keeping the law. If that were true, there would have been no need for the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

We forget that God's primary goal is not changing our situations or relationships so that we can be happy, but changing us through our situations and relationships so that we will be holy.

Our need is so desperate an idea, a thing, a law can't help us. It took one thing, the gift of gifts, God in the flesh, to rescue us.