If the church is going to speak to people weary of religion, it will not be by offering better techniques or louder certainty, but by daring to say what Paul so plainly said: Christ is enough.
Surveying Scripture, it is an immense comfort to know we’re not alone in our sinfulness.
Christian faith is never a solitary possession. When the congregation confesses, the old speak for the young, the strong for the weak, and the clear-voiced for the trembling.

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The age of grace has dawned, the time in which all things will be made new.
As the church gathers in worship, however, different words reverberate in readings, hymns, and homilies. These words beckon us to get dirty.
Thank God for heroes: they inspire us to be better, to help others, to live and work for the good of our race. And thank God for villains, too: they incarnate our shadow side, our nocturnal soul, the dragon within us that must incessantly have its throat slit on the altar of repentance.
What we notice less often is that this same fear wonders about both the efficacy of the Gospel and the Law.
The Christian sees himself or herself as one just as guilty as the rest of the world. But we see ourselves not just as what’s wrong with the world, but in the One by whom the world has been redeemed.
When I hear the word “repentance” my mind quickly goes to those old terror inducing Chick Tracts.
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.
Too often, we equate “repent” as the final warning to stop a particular sin before God ceases to love you and sends you to hell for your evil deeds.
When we imagine we’re living an evil-shunning, virtue-practicing, morally superior Christian life, the problem is not that our halos are too small, but that our heads are too big.
Jesus is in the business of proclaiming such a beautiful redundancy.
God’s Law is a death sentence for us sinners. There is no winning beneath the Law of God.
The greatest joy of Lent is failing at it only to find Jesus has already done it for us.