The Bible is one long story of God meeting our rebellion with His rescue, our sin with His salvation, our guilt with His grace, our badness with His goodness. The overwhelming focus of the Bible is not the work of the redeemed but the work of the Redeemer. Which means that the Bible is not first a recipe for Christian living but a revelation book of Jesus who is the answer to our un-Christian living.

I was spending way too much time thinking about me and what I needed to do, and far too little time thinking about Jesus and what he had already done for me.

If you feel compelled to respond every time you're criticized it reveals just how much you've built your identity on being right.

Your pain could be God prying open your life and heart to remove a gift of His that you've been on to more dearly than Him.

Grace frees you to be honest about what you've always known to be true about yourself: that you're weaker & more afraid than you want to be.

The pain cleared my vision, and once it was taken away, I realized just how much I'd been relying on the endorsement of others to make me feel like I mattered.

Sanctification consists of the daily realization that in Christ we have died, and in Christ we have been raised.