My job is not to show my children that I'm the man, but to show them that Christ is the man.

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.

Thankfully, while our self-righteousness reaches far, God's grace reaches farther.

When you fail to distinguish Law and Gospel, you lose both.

The gospel frees you from the pressure of having to fix people: your worth is located in Christ, not in their transformation.

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.

There's nothing like suffering to reveal how small and needy you are. Pain has the remarkable capacity to reveal the weakness of the things you're leaning on to make life worth living.