The Wake-Up Call

We know that we know that we know we are not created for death. We are created for life, and not only endless life but eternal life.

We can simply stand on the testimony, and stand we must—not with our gospel guns raised to shoot but, as humble lovers of the truth, ready to quietly serve or boldly speak up as the calling of faith requires.

This psalm sees the whole trajectory, from justification to sanctification and, indeed, even envisions that final day when we are delivered from not only the guilt and power of sin, but even the presence of sin.

Give us the discernment to recognize the first faint whisper of any teaching that departs from your truth, your ways, or your will.

There is no such thing as a trouble-free life. There is only the promise of overcoming.

The promise—for everyone who believes—is to overcome.

In order for my love to grow deeper in the ways of the love of God, my perception, interpretation, and understanding of the truth must deepen.

The presence of Jesus, which is to say the presence of holy love, drives out fear by displacing it.

It is far more important to have clarity than certainty.

We all have a tendency to try to refashion God in an image of our own making, but the God of biblical revelation is the God whom we will someday face.

Faith is the mysterious convergence of crisis and process and demonstration built on three corresponding kinds of evidence: empirical, experiential, and experimental.

Love is made complete when the gladness of the giver gets expressed through the generosity of the recipient to release the gift forward to yet another.

The big problem is not that we are in the world. The problem is the world is in us.

It all comes back to Jesus. Jesus is the Truth. If we don’t comprehend and confess the truth about the Truth, we are sitting ducks for false teachers.

This path of persistent confession is the only pathway by which we are set free of the condemnation we heap on ourselves.

Truth is ever asking the question, Is our inward reality of love becoming the outward activity of love?

The psalmist didn’t fully know how God would redeem him from death, but he knew that if we were united to an eternal God, then he must have a plan for us.

The big issue isn’t whether we are helping people in need; it’s whether our hearts are truly open to those we are helping.

Nothing is more beautiful or winsome or powerful than people laying down their interests and agendas and needs and desires for the best interests of others.

In other words, loving one another is not the condition for salvation but the evidence of it.

John is calling us to aim at a particular variety of love, to aspire to a way of life—eternal life—here and now. Eternal life is life on another level. It’s life in the light of love.

I’m tired of watered-down faith. I want the not-from-concentrate Christian faith. I want “Simply Jesus.”

If sin has lost its power, maybe the problem is we have not taken up our power.

This psalm foreshadows the great vision of the new covenant, where men and women from every tribe, tongue, and nation will be adopted into the family of God.

I think the biggest problem we Christians have with sin is our lack of belief that it can be overcome.