The gospel is not about a lifestyle that we live, it's about the law-fulfilling life that Christ lived.

I was spending too much time thinking about how I was doing, if I was learning everything I was supposed to be learning during this difficult season, whether I was doing it right or not, taking my spiritual pulse, etc - my inner lawyer was working overtime.

We don't need answers and explanations as much as we need God's presence in and through the suffering.

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.

Only the gospel can truly save you. The gospel doesn't make good people good; it makes dead people alive. That's the difference between the gospel of Jesus Christ and every other world religion. All the others exhort their followers to save themselves by being good, by conforming their lives to whatever their worshiped deity is. But the gospel is God's acceptance of us based on what Christ has done, not on what we can do.

Legalism says God will love us if we change. The gospel says God will change us because He loves us.

I actually think one of most profoundly and deep pastoral moments between a pastor and his church is what happens between them before God in the context of preaching.