The Pharisee valued fasting and giving tithes, but could not find value in his fellow sinner.
God is not a tool in our hands. He does not exist to serve our goals, our metrics, or our platforms.
The gospel isn’t for the strong but people who know they aren’t.

All Articles

For on the other side of the death of forgiveness is the resurrection of joy. An easter in which we emerge from the tomb in the arms of the man whose scars glow with mercy.
Prechers translate as a calling. Called by God, they are given a message, and for most of their hearers it is to one degree or another a message in a language from afar, with strange concepts, sometimes with a more familiar ring, sometimes with a strange sound.
The following is an excerpt from A Path Strewn with Sinners: A Devotional Study of Mark’s Gospel and His Race to the Cross written by Wade Johnston (1517 Publishing, 2017).
Amazing things. That’s what happens when the Triune God shows up in Jesus Christ.
Whatever loss you’ve undergone, whatever grief resides in the hollow of your heart, however much it seems like God has abandoned you, God sees that void as the place he wants to fill with new life and mercy.
A father dies and leaves an inheritance to his two children, Jane and Grace. The family member handling the estate gives them each a letter containing the cheques for their inheritance.
We prefer this to be switched around. We want something to happen in us before anything happens outside of us.
Don’t say you’re beyond hope, for there is not one beyond God. Don’t say you’ve done too much evil, for there is no wrong bigger than God’s heart of forgiveness.
The Confessions instead look forward and provide a critique of the world and of all my various religions and idolatries.
But when we trust Jesus, then we close our eyes to it all and say, “Heavenly Father, I’m your child.
The foundation of the Christian’s life is that our life is not our own. We don’t belong to ourselves. God has purchased us with the currency of Jesus’s blood.
It has been three years since Allyson and I honeymooned in New Orleans. We had a great time eating our way through the French Quarter, learning to drive in a city of only ways, and forgetting that real life existed for only a few days.