Don't get me wrong - what we do is important. But it is infinitely less important than what Jesus has done for us.

The ironic thing about legalism is that it not only doesn't make people work harder, it makes them give up. Moralism doesn't produce morality; rather, it produces immorality.

I got my first tennis racket on my seventh birthday. And because we had a tennis court in our backyard, I played every day. By ten I was playing competitively.

God reminds us again and again that things between He and us are forever fixed. They are the rendezvous points where God declares to us concretely that the debt has been paid, the ledger put away, and that everything we need, in Christ we already possess. This re-convincing produces humility, because we realize that our needs are fulfilled. We don’t have to worry about ourselves anymore. This in turn frees us to stop looking out for what we think we need and liberates us to love our neighbor by looking out for what they need.

Grace is upside-down, to-do-list wrecking, scandalous and way-too free. It's one-way love.

Self-righteousness is unavoidable. You can either be a self-righteous Pharisee where you think you are better than everyone else or you can be a self-righteous pagan who thinks you are better than the Pharisee. If you are a self-righteous person, I could become very self-righteous thinking that you're self-righteous and you think you're so good but I know you're bad. I know I'm bad so that makes me better than you.

To be Biblically balanced is to let our theology and preaching be proportioned by the Bible's radically disproportionate focus on God's saving love for sinners seen and accomplished in the crucified and risen Christ.