Big cities have a lot of ‘younger brothers’ who have left traditional parts of the world and their families for a more liberal lifestyle. But cities are filled to the gills with ‘elder brothers’ too.
I wouldn’t venture to say which kind of sin is more prevalent. I wouldn’t even want to try to characterize certain ‘circles.’
So if someone asks you if you are a Christian, you should not say, “Of course!” There should be no “of course-ness” about it. It would be more appropriate to say, “Yes, I am, and that’s a miracle. Me! A Christian! Who would have ever thought it? Yet he did it, and I’m his.” SHE.
Only Jesus says, “I have come for the weak. I have come for those who admit they are weak. I will save them not by what they do but through what I do.
Our greatest motive for surrendering to him cannot be for what he will do in us. It must be to love him for what he did for us. In.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion. It can’t be co-opted by either moralism or relativism.
The choice is ours. If we want to be sure to experience this vision by sight hereafter, we must know it by faith now. If we want freedom from being driven by fear, ambition, greed, lust, addictions, and inner emptiness, we must learn how to meditate on Christ until his glory breaks in upon our souls.
When Christian believers care more for their own interests and security than for the good and salvation of other races and ethnicities, they are sinning like Jonah. If they value the economic and military flourishing of their country over the good of the human race and the furtherance of God’s work in the world, they are sinning like Jonah. Their identity is more rooted in their race and nationality than in being saved sinners and children of God.
So no one is really neutral about whether Christmas is true. If the Son of God was really born in a manger, then we have lost the right to be in charge of our lives.” – Tim Keller.
If believers in God don’t honor the cries and claims of the poor, we don’t honor him, whatever we profess, because we hide his beauty from the eyes of the world. When we pour ourselves out for the poor – that gets the world’s notice.
There has never been a gift offered that makes you swallow your pride to the depths that the gift of Jesus Christ requires us to do. Christmas means that we are so lost, so unable to save ourselves, that nothing less than the death of the Son of God himself could save us. That means you are not somebody who can pull yourself together and live a moral and good life.
Jesus declares not that he has come to reform religion but that he’s here to end religion and to replace it with himself.
Christmas and the incarnation mean that God went to infinite lengths to make himself one whom we can know personally. What.
At the root of each and every sin, and each and every problem, is unbelief and a rejection of the gospel.
An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, “If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.
God loves and defends those with the least economic and social power, and so should we. That is what it means to “do justice.
The true god of your heart is what your thoughts effortlessly go to when there is nothing else demanding your attention.
So Paul does not look to the Corinthians for his identity. He does not go to them for the verdict that he is a ‘somebody’. He does not get that sense of identity from them. But he does not get it from himself either. He knows that trying to find self-esteem by living up to a certain set of standards is a trap.
The lesson is that the medium is not the message, that we must not ignore uncomfortable truths just because they come through an unimpressive messenger.
Idols give us a sense of being in control, and we can locate them by looking at our nightmares. What do we fear the most? What, if we lost it, would make life not worth living? We make “sacrifices” to appease and please our gods, who we believe will protect us.