Jesus comes not for the super-spiritual but for the wobbly and the weak-kneed who know they don’t have it all together, and who are not too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace.
A man doesn’t grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul.
The way you are with others every day, regardless of their status, is the true test of faith.
Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try and find something or someone that it cannot cover. Grace is enough.
Ruthless trust ultimately comes down to this: faith in the person of Jesus and hope in his promise.
The trouble with our ideals is that if we live up to all of them, we become impossible to live with.
Do you honestly believe God likes you, not just loves you because theologically God has to love you?
The men and women who are truly filled with light are those who have gazed deeply into the darkness of their own imperfect existence.
Put bluntly, the American church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice. We say we believe that the fundamental structure of reality is grace, not works – but our lives refute our faith.
The ragamuffin who sees his life as a voyage of discovery and runs the risk of failure has a better feel for faithfulness than the timid man who hides behind the law and never finds out who he is at all.
Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.
All that is good is ours not by right but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God.
The god who exacts the last drop of blood from his Son so that his just anger, evoked by sin, may be appeased, is not the God revealed by and in Jesus Christ. And if he is not the God of Jesus, he does not exist.
Faith means wanting God and wanting to want nothing else.
Our huffing and puffing to impress God, our scrambling for brownie points, our thrashing about trying to fix ourselves while hiding our pettiness and wallowing in guilt are nauseating to God and are a flat denial of the gospel of grace.
If in our hearts we really don’t believe that God loves us as we are, if we are still tainted by the lie that we can do something to make God love us more, we are rejecting the message of the cross.
When we wallow in guilt, remorse, and shame over real or imagined sins of the past, we are disdaining God’s gift of grace.
The Word we study has to be the Word we pray.
The ragamuffin gospel reveals that Jesus forgives sins, including the sins of the flesh; that He is comfortable with sinners who remember how to show compassion; but that He cannot and will not have a relationship with pretenders in the Spirit.
Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become.