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...

Our assurance is anchored in the love and grace of God expressed in the glorious exchange: our sin for His righteousness.

The gospel announces that God doesn’t relate to us based on our feats for Jesus, but Jesus’ feats for us.

The good news of suffering is that it brings us to the end of ourselves – a purpose it has certainly served in my life. It brings us to the place of honesty, which is...

When everyone in the world spoke the same language, God came down in judgment, breaking the world apart. But at just the right time, he came down again, this time to reconcile that sinful world...

Indeed, there is nothing like suffering to remind us how much we need God. What good news that His purpose and plan for our lives moves in a different direction from ours!

The world isn’t scandalized by our freedom but by our fakeness.

The Gospel announces that Jesus came to acquit the guilty. He came to judge and be judged in our place. Christ came to satisfy the deep judgment against us once and for all so that...

Sanctification consists of the daily realization that in Christ we have died, and in Christ we have been raised.

When it comes to engaging and influencing culture, too many Christians think too highly of political activism.

Legalism says God will love us if we change. The gospel says God will change us because He loves us.

Contrary to what we conclude naturally, the gospel is not too good to be true. It is true! It’s the truest truth in the entire universe. No strings attached! No fine print to read. No...

What is indisputable is the fact that unbelief is the force that gives birth to all of our bad behavior and every moral failure. It is the root.

Your identity is firmly anchored in Christ’s accomplishment, not yours; his strength, not yours; his performance, not yours; his victory, not yours.

Hollywood is not known as a culture of grace. Dog-eat-dog is more like it. People love you one day and hate you the next. Personal value is very much attached to box office revenues and...

Justification and sanctification are both God’s work, and while they can and must be distinguished, the Bible won’t let us separate them. Both are gifts of our union with Christ, and within this double-blessing, justification...

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.

Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult not to put conditions on grace.

The Bible makes it clear that self-righteousness is the premier enemy of the Gospel.

There is a strange impulse in many to protect Bible characters and to use them as inspiration… as if sanctification happens as a result of emulation.

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...

Assurance never comes from looking at ourselves. It only comes as a consequence of looking to Christ.

The gospel sets us free to become the romantic leaders of our marriages without fright or hesitation. Because we have been forever wooed by Jesus, we are now free to forever woo our wives.

The world tells us in a thousand different ways that the bigger we become, the freer we will be. The richer, the more beautiful, and the more powerful we grow, the more security, liberty, and...

In ‘Surprised by Grace: God’s Relentless Pursuit of Rebels,’ I retell the story of Jonah and show how Jonah was just as much in need of God’s grace as the sailors and the Ninevites.

There’s absolutely no way you can feel the freedom to embarrass and humiliate yourself unless you have finally recognized that your identity is in someone other than yourself.

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...

Rest assured: Before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we need; before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we have.

An identity based in the one-way love of God does not take into account public opinion or, thankfully, even personal opinion.

The passive righteousness of faith frees me from passing final judgment on myself.

back-door legalism”).

Don’t get me wrong – what we do is important. But it is infinitely less important than what Jesus has done for us.

For the life of the believer, one thing is beautifully and abundantly true: God’s chief concern in your suffering is to be with you and be Himself for you. And in the end, what we...

To be Biblically balanced is to let our theology and preaching be proportioned by the Bible’s radically disproportionate focus on God’s saving love for sinners seen and accomplished in the crucified and risen Christ.

My failure to lay aside the sin that so easily entangles is the direct result of my refusal to die to my natural proclivity toward attaining my own freedom, meaning, value, worth, and righteousness –...

We may not ever fully understand why God allows the suffering that devastates our lives. We may not ever find the right answers to how we’ll dig ourselves out.

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.

My observation of Christendom is that most of us tend to base our relationship with God on our performance instead of on His grace.

When you don’t have anything to lose, you discover something wonderful: you’re free to take great risks without fear or reservation.

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...

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.

Our minds are affected by sin. Our hearts are affected by sin. Our wills are affected by sin. Our bodies are affected by sin.

For years and years, Christians have been singing about their wandering hearts. Our hearts need to be recalibrated and realigned and reoriented by God.

I got my first tennis racket on my seventh birthday. And because we had a tennis court in our backyard, I played every day. By ten I was playing competitively.