Don't allow the opinions of other people to shape your concept of him. Get to know him yourself, and let the goodness of God change you from the inside out.

Nowhere in the Bible, however, do we find God distinguishing between levels of sin. God doesn't share our rating system. To him, all sin is equally evil, and all sinners are equally lovable.

We need a bigger estimation of God and a smaller estimation of sin.

We are often harsher judges than God himself.

Grace is God-given power to live differently.

God transforms us one area at a time.

We need to abandon our scale and adopt God's because our misguided labels keep us from the right kind of interaction with people.

Sometimes God takes your life for some crazy twists and turns.

Make rules and follow rules as needed, but don't focus on riles. Focus on faith. Focus on grace. Focus on Jesus.

Grace is a person. And his name is Jesus.

No sooner do I conquer a bad habit than I become the biggest critic of anyone who still does what I just stopped doing.

When you look in the eyes of grace, when you meet grace, when you embrace grace, when you see the nail prints in grace’s hands and the fire in his eyes, when you feel his relentless love for you - it will not motivate you to sin. It will motivate you to righteousness.

When we meet grace, it becomes the fuel of our faith. We pray, we read our Bibles, we worship and we live the purest lifestyle we can because we love a person.

But freedom starts with honesty. We aren’t doing ourselves any favors by defining our- selves as good and others as bad. Let’s just agree that we all need help, that we are all in this together.

Jesus is not your accuser. He’s not your prosecutor. He’s not your judge. He’s your friend and your rescuer. Like Zacchaeus, just spend time with Jesus. Don’t hide from him in shame or reject him in self-righteousness. Don’t allow the opinions of other people to shape your concept of him. Get to know him for yourself, and let the goodness of God change you from the inside out.

A moment with Jesus changed everything.

Sometimes we are outright rude when we interact with people. We meet a gay guy or a couple living together, and we think we have the obligation and right to warn them what God thinks about their sexuality on our first meeting. As if their sex life is the first thing on God’s agenda.It’s not.Love is. Grace is. Mercy is. Jesus is.

It seemed too good to be true. That's grace.

The Bible is meant to be down-to-earth. It was written for real people facing real issues.

But difficult situations and wrong choices conspire to trap us in hopelessness.

Sometimes we get way too fixated on how powerful sin is and how weak we are. We worry that if we relax for a second, we'll mess up royally and ruin everything. Ironically, our paranoia only serves to make us more conscious of our sinfulness.

Rules are not proof of our spirituality. If anything, they are proof of our sinfulness, a reminder that we have a tendency toward wrongdoing and that we need help.