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 apostle Paul claimed the Law is written on the 'fleshy tables' of the human heart (2 Cor. 3:3 KJV). What he meant are these 'shoulds' and 'shouldn'ts' are both instinctual and inescapable, part of our DNA. They are a psychological reality. We may justify our actions away, but deep down, we know when we've done something wrong.

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.

The hub of Christianity is not 'do something for Jesus.' The hub of Christianity is 'Jesus has done everything for you.' And my fear is that too many people, both inside and outside the church, have heard our pleas for intensified devotion and concluded that the focus of Christian faith is our love for God instead of God's love for us. Don't get me wrong--what we do is important. But it is infinitely less important than what Jesus has done for us.

Because Jesus was someone, you’re free to be no one.

Daily Christian living, in other words, is daily Christian dying: dying to our trivial comforts, soul-shrinking conveniences, arrogant preferences, and self-centered entitlements, and living for something much larger than what makes us comfortable and safe.

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.

By looking at the Bible as if it were fundamentally about us, we totally miss the Point–like the two on the road to Emmaus. As Luke 24 shows, it's possible to read the Bible, study the Bible, and memorize large portions of the Bible, while missing the whole point of the Bible. It's entirely possible, in other words, to read the stories and miss the Story.

Whether it's a Christian or a non-Christian, there's nothing like suffering to show us how small, needy, and not in control we are. Suffering has a way of sobering us up to the realization that we can't make it on our own, that we need help, that we're broken.

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

One-way love is rare, though, and it always comes as a surprise. Fortunately, the glimpses we receive in relationships are only a foreshadowing of God's love for us. They are like little arrows that point to the very heart of the universe, what Dante called 'the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,' the love that received its fullest expression in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

The Bible is not a witness to the best people making it up to God; it's a witness to God making it down to the worst people. Far from being a book full of moral heroes whom we are commanded to emulate, what we discover is that the so-called heroes in the Bible are not really heroes at all. They fall and fail; they make huge mistakes; they get afraid; they're selfish, deceptive, egotistical, and unreliable. The Bible is one long story of God meeting our rebellion with His rescue, our sin with His salvation, our guilt with His grace, our badness with His goodness.

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.

one primary enemy of the Gospel—legalism—comes in two forms. Some people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by keeping the rules, doing what they’re told, maintaining the standards, and so on (you could call this “front-door legalism”). Other people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by breaking the rules, doing whatever they want, developing their own autonomous standards, and so on (you could call this “back-door legalism”).

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.

When I was 25, I believed I could change the world. At 41, I have come to the realization that I cannot change my wife, my church, or my kids, to say nothing of the world. Try as I might, I have not been able to manufacture outcomes the way I thought I could, either in my own life or other people’s.

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.

God reminds us again and again that things between He and us are forever fixed. They are the rendezvous points where God declares to us concretely that the debt has been paid, the ledger put away, and that everything we need, in Christ we already possess. This re-convincing produces humility, because we realize that our needs are fulfilled. We don’t have to worry about ourselves anymore. This in turn frees us to stop looking out for what we think we need and liberates us to love our neighbor by looking out for what they need.

We make a big mistake when we conclude that the law is the answer to bad behavior. In fact, the law alone stirs up more of such behavior. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the law. To be sure, the Spirit does use both God's law and God's gospel in our sanctification. But the law and the gospel do very different things.