We forget that God's primary goal is not changing our situations or relationships so that we can be happy, but changing us through our situations and relationships so that we will be holy.Collection: Goal
God never intended for us to simply be the objects of His love. We are also called to be the instruments of that love in the lives of others.Collection: His Love
The cross guarantees that even in your darkest moment God will never turn in disgust and walk away. There is no rebellion, no weakness, no foolishness, no evil of heart that the cross can't defeat and grace can't transform.Collection: Heart
God's design in our pain enables us to look back and say: He loves me enough to take me where I would have never wanted to go in order to produce in me what I never could have achieved on my own.Collection: Pain
Remember, it is not your weakness that will get in the way of God's working through you, but your delusions of strength. His strength is made perfect in our weakness! Point to His strength by being willing to admit your weakness.Collection: Strength
There is a God of awesome grace who meets his children in moments of darkness and difficulty. He is worth running to. He is worth waiting for. He brings rest when it seems like there is no rest to be found.Collection: Running
We must begin by admitting that people and situations do not cause us to speak as we do. Our hearts control our words. People and situations simply provide the occasion for the heart to express itself.Collection: Heart
If you don't keep the eyes of your heart focused on the paradise that is to come, you will try to turn this poor fallen world into the paradise it will never be.Collection: Eye
When Christ is my hope, he becomes the one thing in which I have confidence. I act on his wisdom and bank on his grace. I trust his promises and I rely on his presence. And I pursue all the good things that he has promised me simply because I trust him. So, I am not manipulating, controlling, or threatening my way through life to get what I want, because I have found what I want in Christ. He is my hope.Collection: Grace
Love is willing self-sacrifice for the good of another that does not require reciprocation or that the person being loved is deservingCollection: Sacrifice
Grace will expose the deepest issues of your heart, then point you to the Cross which covers everything that's been exposed.Collection: Heart
The church is not a theological classroom. It is a conversion, confession, repentance, reconciliation, forgiveness and sanctification center, where flawed people place their faith in Christ, gather to know and love him better, and learn to love others as he designed.Collection: People
Corporate worship is a regular gracious reminder that it's not about you. You've been born into a life that is a celebration of another.Collection: Celebration
Every time you ask for forgiveness, you recognize that the biggest problems you face in life exist inside of you, not outside of you.Collection: Faces
God is the ultimate musician. His music transforms your life. The notes of redemption rearrange your heart and restore your life. His songs of forgiveness, grace, reconciliation, truth, hope, sovereignty, and love give you back your humanity and restore your identity.Collection: Song
The good news of the kingdom is not freedom from hardship, suffering, and loss. It is the news of a Redeemer who has come to rescue me from myself.Collection: Loss
The fatal flaw of human wisdom is that it promises that you can change your relationships without needing to change yourself.Collection: Promise
You can tell yourself that God's not fair, or you can thank Him that He's not fair. If God was fair, we would be doomed and condemned.Collection: Would Be
Today you will envy the blessings of another, or you will bask in the wonder of the amazing grace you have been given.Collection: Blessing
Every day you preach to yourself a gospel of your loneliness, inability, and lack of resources or you faithfully preach to yourself the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.Collection: Jesus
The more you understand the magnitude of God's grace, the more accurate will be your view of the depth of your unrighteousness ; and the more you understand the depth of your unrighteousness , the more you will appreciate the magnitude of God's gift of grace.Collection: Views
Our sin is what separates us from God, but it's our self righteousness that keeps us from running to Him for the grace He willingly gives to all who come.Collection: Running
See yourself and weep. See your God and rejoice.Collection: Rejoice
Harboring bitterness against people is actually confessing their sin to myself, over and over again. Anger is akin to confessing their sin to God, dissatisfied that he hasn't done something and placing myself in his position as judge.Collection: People
Sin doesn't always look sinful to us; sometimes it looks beautiful. That's why we need grace to see sin for what it really is - dark, dangerous, enslaving and destructive.Collection: Beautiful
God's grace doesn't always come in comfortable forms. But it's still grace, and it's still evidence that He loves us.Collection: Grace
In the family, life is brought not only to our doorstep, but into our kitchens, bedrooms, and dens. In the family, life is happening all around us, and it begs to be questioned, evaluated, interpreted, and discussed. There is no more consistent, pregnant, dynamic forum for instruction about life than the family, because that is exactly what God designed the family to be, a learning community.Collection: Community
The kingdom of self tends to be more focused on what the hands can touch than what the heart should embrace.Collection: Heart
Our need is so desperate an idea, a thing, a law can't help us. It took one thing, the gift of gifts, God in the flesh, to rescue us.Collection: Law
We, with all of our sin, weakness, and failures are welcome to do what should blow our minds. We are not only tolerated by God at a distance; no, we are welcomed into intimate personal communion with the King of kings, the Lord of lords, the creator, the sovereign, the Savior. We, as unholy as we are, are told to go with confidence into his holy presence.Collection: Kings
Sin makes us moral quadriplegics.Collection: Moral
Do you require yourself to remember? In order to live as you can and should, you first must remember who you are and what you’ve been given.Collection: Order
The Bible says that our core problem, the fundamental reason we do what we do, is sin.Collection: Fundamentals
There is nothing that could be revealed about a pastor that has not already been covered by the blood of JesusCollection: Jesus
People struggling with life in a fallen world often want explanations when what they really need is imagination.Collection: Struggle
We rarely do anything with on single motive.Collection: Motive
If your hope disappoints you, it is the wrong kind of hope. You see, hope in God never disappoints, precisely because it is hope *in God.* This means that hope placed in any other thing will always end up disappointing.Collection: Mean
Sin is much more than doing the wrong thing. It begins withloving, worshiping, and serving the wrong thing.Collection: Sin
Embedded in the larger story of redemption is a principle we must not miss: God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things in the lives of others.Collection: Leadership
The Bible isn't a storybook with many heroes. No, there's only one hero in Scripture: the Son, the Lamb, the Savior, the King, the Redeemer - Jesus.Collection: Jesus
How can you admit that your only hope is divine grace and then throw condemnation at another sinner when you see them struggle?Collection: Struggle
We were meant to do more than make sure that all of our needs are fulfilled and all our desires are satisfied. We were never meant to be self-focused little kings ruling miniscule little kingdoms with a population of one.Collection: Kings
Theology without love simply is very bad theology.Collection: Theology
When your sin is exposed, you will run toward confession and forgiveness or self-righteousness and self-justification.Collection: Running
We must not offer people a system of redemption, a set of insights and principles. We offer people a Redeemer.Collection: People
You cannot divide human beings into those who worship and those who don't. Everybody worships; it's just a matter of what, or whom, we serve.Collection: Matter
Becaise I love God, I want to handle his truth with accuracy, clarity, and specificity. I want to build bridges of understanding from the wisdom of the Word to the details of people's lives. And because I love people, I will not be satisfied with lobbing grenades of general truth at them. Rather, through good questions, committed listening, and careful interpretation, I will enter their world with the understanding necessary to bring Christ's help to where it is really needed.Collection: Bridges
Sin is powerful, but not as powerful as the liberating power of grace.Collection: Powerful
It is a sweet thing that we serve a dissatisfied God who has destinations in mind for us that we would never choose for ourselves. It really is a good thing that he will not be satisfied until he has gotten us exactly where he created us and re-created us to be. Most of us would have been satisfied to stay at home, and many of us would have quit the journey long before it was completed. But our heavenly Father won't give up until each one of his children has completed the journey.Collection: Faith
Human self-righteousness denies the need for the saving, enabling grace of Christ. Human righteousness embraces the cruelest of Satan's lies, that a person can be righteous by keeping the law. If that were true, there would have been no need for the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ.Collection: Lying