The Wake-Up Call

The penitential psalms are the basic grammar of the repentant life, which should be one of the deepest marks or badges of the Christian life.

In the largest way and with the fewest words, the cross is the weight of the glory of the love of God for the whole world, beginning with me.

The secret to life, according to Jesus, is to die before you die.

Love is greater than faith and until our love is greater than our faith, we are destined for far lesser things than the greater things Jesus promised we would do.

The Lord’s Prayer is more about reminding ourselves of our real needs and who can be trusted to meet those needs.

Grace is never about measuring up. It's the reverse. Grace is about measuring down. God's ways are hidden from the proud and revealed to the humble.

God comes to earth in the form of a first-century Jewish peasant. He lives out before our very eyes a revolutionary life behind which is an extravagant life of prayer.

God promises great things to the one whose trust and desires are oriented towards him.

"But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

With each new turn of the soil, we dig deeper into the sanctifying grace of his love and his plan for us.

Once we accept and awaken to Christ, our eternal life begins.

God’s infinite, eternal, omnipotent being recognizes and accommodates, to some degree, our frail, finite, temporal, and limited nature as a human on this planet.

Trying to locate the limit of God’s removal of our sins, would be like trying to locate the west by heading east—it can never be found.

Righteousness is built, bit by painstaking bit, over many choices, over many directions, over much time.

The contours of the wicked should contrast sharply with the character of those who live under the covenant with God.

"But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

And this is what his unfailing love does for us: it stands between us and any accuser that we face, whether internal or external.

Each day we lean into the solid, trustworthy nature of God to pull us through inevitable trials and suffering.

As Jesus pronounced upon his last breath on the cross, “It is finished.” His work was done and he became free to retire to somewhere he loves: our hearts.

Who we believe God to be often reveals more about us than about God.

Let this desire to know him and be known by him become, like the psalmist declares, an offering of total praise and total worship.

The Psalms cannot imagine a world where the people of God do not see themselves engaged in conflict of some sort.

"But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Only when we actually do God's Word does it become enfleshed in our own lives.

I read the Bible in order to search for and grasp the revealed wisdom of God.