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.

The truth, whether we admit it or not, is that grace scares us to death. It scares us primarily because it wrestles control and manageability out of our hands – introducing chaos and freedom.

A religious approach to marriage is the idea that if we work hard enough at something, we can earn the acceptance, approval, and life we think we deserve because of our obedient performance.

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

Grace is thickly counter-intuitive. It feels risky and unfair. It’s dangerous and disorderly. It wrestles control out of our hands. It is wild and unsettling. It turns everything that makes sense to us upside-down and...

God has hardwired me to thoroughly enjoy and be sharpened by good and friendly theological discussion about the gospel.

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...

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...

The required cheerfulness that characterizes many of our churches produces a suffocating environment of pat, religious answers to the painful, complex questions that riddle the lives of hurting people.

God loves us too much to leave us in the hell of unhappiness that comes from trying to do his job. Into the slavish misery of our ladder-defined lives, God condescends.

Passive righteousness tells us that God does not need our good works. Active righteousness tells us that our neighbor does. The aim and direction of good works are horizontal, not vertical.

There is no better story in the Old Testament, or perhaps the whole Bible, for depicting the difference between the ladder-defined life and the cross-defined life than that of the Tower of Babel.

I was afraid that if I surrendered my life over to God, God would tell me not to do those things that I desperately wanted to do.

Only the gospel can truly save you. The gospel doesn’t make good people good; it makes dead people alive. That’s the difference between the gospel of Jesus Christ and every other world religion. All the...

We are deeply conditioned against unconditionality because we’ve been told in a thousand different ways that accomplishment always precedes acceptance, that achievement always precedes approval.

At some level, every relationship is assaulted by an aroma of judgment – this sense that we will never measure up to the expectations and demands of another.

The deepest fear we have, ‘the fear beneath all fears,’ is the fear of not measuring up, the fear of judgment. It’s this fear that creates the stress and depression of everyday life.

If we read the Bible asking first, ‘What would Jesus do?’ instead of asking ‘What has Jesus done,’ we’ll miss the good news that alone can set us free.

God wants to free us from ourselves, and there’s nothing like suffering to show us that we need something bigger than our abilities and our strength and our explanations.

Contrary to popular assumptions, the Bible is not a record of the blessed good, but rather the blessed bad. That’s not a typo. The Bible is a record of the blessed bad. The Bible is...

We often read the Bible as if it were fundamentally about us: our improvement, our life, our triumph, our victory, our faith, our holiness, our godliness.

Death is the operative device that sets us free in Christ – when we die, we truly live.

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.

Grace is upside-down, to-do-list wrecking, scandalous and way-too free. It’s one-way love.

Because of total depravity, you and I were desperate for God’s grace before we were saved. Because of total depravity, you and I remain desperate for God’s grace even after we’re saved.

Believe it or not, Christianity is not about good people getting better. If anything, it is good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good.

The Bible is plain that God requires moral perfection. It tells us unambiguously that God is holy and therefore cannot tolerate any hint of unholiness.

I enjoy receiving love from my wife. I’m ecstatic when Kim loves me and expresses affection toward me. Something in me comes alive when she does that. But I’ve learned this freeing truth: I don’t...

The gospel alone liberates you to live a life of scandalous generosity, unrestrained sacrifice, uncommon valor, and unbounded courage.

When God saved me, He gave me a thirst to learn and to read and to study. I thrived in college. I got a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and then went to Reformed Theological Seminary...

Even political insiders recognize that years of political effort on behalf of Evangelical Christians have generated little cultural gain.

Since Genesis 3 we have been addicted to setting our sights on something, someone, smaller than Jesus.

Thankfully, while our self-righteousness reaches far, God’s grace reaches farther.

The gospel is for the defeated, not the dominant.

When the Christian faith becomes defined by who we are and what we do and not by who Christ is and what he did for us, we miss the gospel – and we, ironically, become...

There’s nothing like suffering to remind us how not in control we actually are, how little power we ultimately have, and how much we ultimately need God.

I’m not sure I’ll ever fully understand why some Christians get mad when we say that the ultimate hero in the Bible is not Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Paul, etc… but Jesus.

The emphasis of the Bible is on the work of the Redeemer, not on the work of the redeemed.

Whether this was explicitly taught or implicitly caught, I grew up with the impression that when it comes to the Christian life, justification was step one and sanctification was step two and that once we...

From the time God saved me at 21 years old, I’ve always been fascinated by the parables of Jesus.

Disobedience happens not when we think too much grace but when we think too little of it

The law is God’s first word; the gospel is God’s final word.

I never had an intellectual struggle with the Bible, with the gospel, with the claims of Christ.

Jesus is not the man at the top of the stairs; He is the man at the bottom, the friend of sinners, the savior of those in need of one. Which is all of us,...

I ended up dropping out of high school at 16 and getting kicked out of my home. My parents told me, sadly, that because I was so disruptive to the rest of the household, that...

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.

Because Jesus came to secure for us what we could never secure for ourselves, life doesn’t have to be a tireless effort to establish ourselves, justify ourselves, validate ourselves.

The Why’s of suffering keep us shrouded in a seemingly bottomless void of abstraction where God is reduced to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes measure on the same scale as...

The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit.

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...