God is inviting you today to appropriately grieve your pains and losses and to acknowledge the world is seriously broken.

Rest assured: Before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we need; before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we have.

The good news of suffering is that it brings us to the end of ourselves - a purpose it has certainly served in my life. It brings us to the place of honesty, which is the place of desperation, which is the place of faith, which is the place of freedom.

Whether it's a Christian or a non-Christian, there's nothing like suffering to show us how small, needy, and not in control we are. Suffering has a way of sobering us up to the realization that we can't make it on our own, that we need help, that we're broken.

A biblical understanding of the Christian life is not 'let go and let God,' it's 'trust God and get going.'

The world tells us in a thousand different ways that the bigger we become, the freer we will be. The richer, the more beautiful, and the more powerful we grow, the more security, liberty, and happiness we will experience. And yet, the gospel tells us just the opposite, that the smaller we become, the freer we will be.

I was afraid that if I surrendered my life over to God, God would tell me not to do those things that I desperately wanted to do.