The Christian life is not easy. It’s messy, bloody, sacrificial. It is a constant walking our sin toward the cross, offering the flesh, nailing it to the wood, and leaving it until it suffocates. It’s horrifyingly ugly and breathtakingly beautiful because it’s the same path that Jesus walked.
What is true freedom? In our day, everyone wants it, but no one can find it.
The biggest “Why?” question we must answer is this. Why are we reluctant to rest in God’s finished work? Why do we insist that we have our hand in our salvation? Why would we, who have never succeeded fully at anything in our lives, want to put our dirty hand into the purifying work of God?
In the Bible, God tells us the story of everything culminating in the most important thing: the gospel of Jesus Christ. But walk into any group discussion among American Christians and listen for the conversation to shift to that central story. Can you hear it? Probably not.
We are too often tempted to sell our sonship for slavery. That’s where our heart leads when we forget the gospel.
Some of us are more outgoing than others. Some of us can talk in groups better than one-on-one. But all of us have a responsibility to welcome others into the church God has called us to. There are countless ways to do this, but for those who find it hard to know where to start, here are six ways to greet new people on Sunday.
When the gospel comes first in our message, obedience flows from it. When obedience comes first in our message, the gospel becomes a side dish rather than the entire meal.
We have a problem, and what we need is not a simple removal of guilt. We don’t need our guilty slate wiped clean. We need a new slate altogether. Our problem is not one of degree, with some being more guilty than others. Our problem is one of kind. We have the wrong kind of heart. We need a new one. But how do we get one?
We look at our lives and, if we’re honest, we see very little glory. We see struggle and hardship and failure. We wonder what happened to the dreams we once had. We have been beaten up and cast aside. But the gospel offers us something new
f we're not resting in God's free gift of grace, we will hold others to a different standard, and it will a standard that we ourselves set but that we attribute to God.
