The world isn’t scandalized by our freedom but by our fakeness.
Your pain could be God prying open your life and heart to remove a gift of His that you’ve been holding on to more dearly than Him.
The great hope we find in the Christian faith is that God is not us.
Disobedience happens not when we think too much grace but when we think too little of it
We spend more time asking what would Jesus do instead of what did Jesus do.
Because Jesus paid it all, we are free from the need to do it all. Our identity, worth, and value, are not anchored in what we can accomplish but in what Jesus accomplished for us.
Because Jesus was someone, you’re free to be no one.
I wish I could say that everything I do is for God’s glory but I can’t. And neither can you. What I can say is Jesus’ blood covers all my efforts to glorify myself.
Since Genesis 3 we have been addicted to setting our sights on something, someone, smaller than Jesus.
Legalism says God will love us if we change. The gospel says God will change us because He loves us.
It’s when we come to the end of ourselves that we come to the beginning of grace.
We are, without doubt, broken people living with other broken people in a broken world.
God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be, because nobody is as they should be. It is the message of grace.~Quote by Brennan Manning
God attaches no strings to His love. None. His love for us does not depend on our loveliness. It goes one way. As far as our sin may extend, the grace of our Father extends further.
The only ‘if’ the Gospel knows is this: ‘if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.’ (1 John 2:1)
What you will encounter is ‘grace unmeasured, vast and free’ –the kind that will frighten and free you at the same time. That’s what grace does, after all.
The smaller you get—the smaller life makes you—the easier it is to see the grandeur of grace. While I am far more incapable than I may have initially thought, God is infinitely more capable than I ever hoped.
An institution theoretically devoted to providing comfort to those in need (the church) is in trouble because it has embraced the same pressure cooker we find everywhere else.
If you uproot the idol and fail to plant the love of Christ in its place, the idol will grow back.
The tragic irony in all of this is that when we focus so strongly on our need to get better, we actually get worse.
The passive righteousness of faith frees me from passing final judgment on myself.
most people live their life as if their justification depends on their sanctification: if I do and become all that I must do and become, God will love me and accept me.
Believe it or not, Christianity is not about good people getting better. If anything, it is good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good.
What is indisputable is the fact that unbelief is the force that gives birth to all of our bad behavior and every moral failure. It is the root.
Your identity is firmly anchored in Christ’s accomplishment, not yours; his strength, not yours; his performance, not yours; his victory, not yours.
God wants to free us from ourselves, and there’s nothing like suffering to show us that we need something bigger than our abilities and our strength and our explanations.
Thankfully, while our self-righteousness reaches far, God’s grace reaches farther.
The deepest fear we have, ‘the fear beneath all fears,’ is the fear of not measuring up, the fear of judgment. It’s this fear that creates the stress and depression of everyday life.
The gospel alone liberates you to live a life of scandalous generosity, unrestrained sacrifice, uncommon valor, and unbounded courage.
I got my first tennis racket on my seventh birthday. And because we had a tennis court in our backyard, I played every day. By ten I was playing competitively.
When the Christian faith becomes defined by who we are and what we do and not by who Christ is and what he did for us, we miss the gospel – and we, ironically, become more disobedient.
We often read the Bible as if it were fundamentally about us: our improvement, our life, our triumph, our victory, our faith, our holiness, our godliness.
The gospel sets us free to become the romantic leaders of our marriages without fright or hesitation. Because we have been forever wooed by Jesus, we are now free to forever woo our wives.