Forgiveness from Jesus is always surprising to us.
The Christ who rescues does not wait for you to be clean. He comes to clean you. He does not need your strength. He brings his own.
When you remember your baptism, you're not recalling a ritual. You're standing under a current of divine action that has not ceased to flow since the moment those baptismal waters hit your skin.

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I don’t need to watch a blood-soaked story on CNN or visit someone of death row to familiarize myself with the beast of depravity crouched within the human heart. I just need to look in the mirror, to stare deeply into the eyes that are a window to a soul that has journeyed down dark paths whose only illumination comes from the fires of hell.
She against whom I preached, in her unexpected response actually “preached” to me three truths I have never forgotten.
The Spirit, who endowed the tabernacle architects with wisdom from on high, overshadows Mary's womb, the new holy of holies, where Wisdom is incarnate below.
Let him feel the heft of stone cradled in his palm, and consider the gravity of guilt cast upon the hypocrite.
Never are we more Hollywood than when we admit wrongdoing. Our confession is scripted, edited, practiced. Move over Brad Pitt; I’ve got this role down pat, for it’s my version of me.
Strange though it be, however, it is marvelous in meaning: for this was his way of writing his covenant into the very flesh of his people. What was not there, was a sign of what was there.
A few weeks ago, the pastor of my congregation did something in his sermon I’ve never heard a pastor do: he confessed a failure. He had once been ashamed of his brother, he admitted, and had acted in a way toward him that was not in keeping with love.
A few people can endure a Job-like hell, get up, bless God, and face the future stronger than ever. Most of us aren’t such saints. We hobble along, half-walking, half-crawling into the will-be from the what-was.
Ingram Robinson was 91 years old and had seen it all—well, almost seen it all. For what his eyes were about to behold, as the sun rose on his ninth decade in this world, was something entirely, and radically, new.
Sometimes, the best sermons aren’t preached by preachers at all.