We are not responsible for finding the right formula to combat or unlock our suffering.
There are a still lot of people in today’s church who can easily identify the idolatry outside the church and are pretty proud of the fact that they are not like them. And yet, we are far too slow to recognize the idolatry inside the church and more painfully, the idolatry inside our hearts.
Job’s unraveling wasn’t wrong or sinful; rather, it was emotionally realistic.
Your pain could be God prying open your life and heart to remove a gift of His that you’ve been on to more dearly than Him.
Only the Holy Spirit can comfort a person in the depths of grief.
Grace could not have done it’s curing work if the law had not first done its crushing work.
God’s capacity to forgive is greater than our capacity to sin; while our sin reaches far, God’s grace reaches farther. It’s a message revealing the radical contrast between the sinful heart of mankind and the gracious heart of mankind’s Creator.
Information is seldom enough to heal a wounded heart.
The Gospel frees us to speak honestly about the reality of pain, confident that nothing is riding on our ability to cope with or fend off suffering.
Once God saves us He doesn’t move us beyond the gospel, but He moves us more deeply into the gospel.
In the Old Testament, we are continually told that our good works are not enough, that God has made a provision. This provision is pointed to at every place in the Old Testament.
I think for far too long the Church has concluded that Christians don’t need the gospel, it’s simple what non-Christian people need in order to be saved.
God is not interested in what you think you should be or feel. He is not interested in the narrative you have constructed for yourself, or that others have constructed for you – even the one that your church has constructed for you.
Because the church has moved away from the gospel anytime you move away from the gospel, you at the same time move toward pretense, you move toward image-keeping, you move toward the need to pretend.
Before we can even begin to grapple with the frustrations and tragedies of life in this world, we must do away with our faithless morality of payback and reward.
If you look at the gospel, it just doesn’t break things apart. The gospel brings things together. One of the great demonstration of the gospel’s power is reconciliation.
If you have suffered the loss of a family member to chronic disease, if you suffer debilitating seasons of depression, if you have lost your job and livelihood, gone through a divorce that came out of the blue, know that God is not punishing you. He is not waiting for you to do something.
The ironic thing about legalism is that it not only doesn’t make people work harder, it makes them give up. Moralism doesn’t produce morality; rather, it produces immorality.
We must reacquaint ourselves with the biblical weight of the problem that we less-than-perfect human beings contend with in the face of a holy and righteous God.
My job as a pastor and theologian is to tease out the nature and the necessity of the gospel in meticulous ways, in everything I say, in everything I like. I want desperately for the church in America to rediscover the power and the beauty and the nature and the necessity of the gospel.