If you have suffered the loss of a family member to chronic disease, if you suffer debilitating seasons of depression, if you have lost your job and livelihood, gone through a divorce that came out of the blue, know that God is not punishing you. He is not waiting for you to do something.

Grace is thickly counter-intuitive. It feels risky and unfair. It's dangerous and disorderly. It wrestles control out of our hands. It is wild and unsettling. It turns everything that makes sense to us upside-down and inside-out.

If the depths of everyone's sin was made public, we would all be much more gracious to each other.

The Gospel is not ultimately a defense from pain, it is the message of God's rescue through pain. In fact, it allows us to drop our defenses, to escape not from pain but from the prison of "How" and "Why" to the freedom of "Who?"

In the Old Testament, we are continually told that our good works are not enough, that God has made a provision. This provision is pointed to at every place in the Old Testament.

Long-term, gospel-motivate d obedience can only come from the grace of what Jesus has already done, not the guilt of what we must do.

When we reduce the notion of “calling” to work inside the church, we fail to equip our people to apply their Christian faith to everything they do, everywhere they are.