Wisdom and strength require bootstrap-pulling and the placing of noses to grindstones.
“If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).
How do the words “The righteous shall live by his faith” go from a context of hope in hopelessness to the cornerstone declaration of the chief doctrine of the Christian faith?

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The Lamb is where we are, opposite God, in our place as sinners. He bears our punishment of sin, the forsakenness of God. Anyone bearing his or her own sin is finally lost, but not Jesus.
God will keep his promises, but how he keeps them is often quite surprising.
The Psalms do anything but present a sugar-coated presentation of the Christian life. In fact, they are decidedly real about the missed expectations we face so often.
In their last Q&A with Jesus, the disciples ask, "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" I used to think that was a dumb question by confused disciples. I was wrong. In his response, Jesus teaches them--and us--what the restoration of Israel's kingdom really looks like.
The point is that the whole lot was wicked. And so were the Galatian Christians. And so are we.
As we stand before our Lord dead in our transgressions and guilt, Jesus pronounces His judgment upon us. He absolves us.
Zipporah and Moses were bound by blood. More than that, God and Moses were bound by blood.
As we judge and demand payment from one another, we fashion a world not only skeptical of forgiveness, grace, and mercy... but downright opposed to it.
The Pastoral Prophet: Meditations on the Book of Jeremiah written by Steve Kruschel is available for preorder through 1517 Publishing. The following is an excerpt.
We all live with the knowledge of good and evil, but lack the power or ability to affect either one. We can judge good and evil but we cannot control them.
When we try to create meaning for our lives or transform Jesus into a mere example, the Holy Spirit comes to us, with a preacher in hand, ready to unleash a sermon like Louis Armstrong blasting out "When The Saints Go Marching In" on his trumpet.
How we feel is so often conditioned upon what we are experiencing. Faith grabs hold of something outside our experience, something objective and true that is not changed by circumstance.