All Articles

Your champion steps forward.
The legacy of Jonah is troubled with most remembering him not for what he said but for what he did: run away.
On this Maundy Thursday, in particular, let the “for you” of Christ’s gifts dominate.
Simon carried the cross, but Jesus was carried by the cross to death.
When explaining that sinners were saved by grace alone Erasmus would not go so far as to say that the reception of God’s grace erased human responsibility.
And because Jesus on the cross was sin in its entirety, God cannot look at him. He turns his face away, causing Jesus to cry out in utmost agony, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
Some things, once they are deemed disgusting or contaminated, permanently carry that quality with them. These things are even thought to be “contagious,” negatively affecting whatever they come into contact with.
When we say in the benediction, “The LORD make His face shine on you,” grace is what we mean.
True preaching arises when the Holy Spirit steeps the proclaimer in its own cycle of judgment and mercy.
How strange and yet how comforting: God prays to God for us, the Spirit to the Father. He sees through the fog of our emotions to what we truly need.
I stumbled down labyrinthine paths, crawled in and out of cavernous pits, got lost a million times, and somehow ended up a little farther down the road to healing. Yet in all those crooked lines I see the hand of God writing straight.
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.