The greatest obstacle to friendship in middle age isn't that nobody wants friends. It's that everyone is waiting for someone else to go first. But here's the good news: Christ has already gone first for you. And because He has, you are free to go first for someone else.
Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for everything under heaven. But God has also placed eternity in our hearts, and that makes us strange creatures: able to rejoice in this life yet always aching for a life that only Christ can give.
What does it take to draw near to God? It takes a perfect priest, a finished work, and a broken body to open the way. In short, it takes everything, which is exactly what Christ has given for you.

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Grace remits sin, and peace quiets the conscience. Sin and conscience torment us, but Christ has overcome these fiends now and forever.
Our children are not our own, but even more, our children are born in need. They are sinful, from conception and from birth.
I write this as someone who’s genuinely concerned that American congregants are getting bamboozled by preachers who are giving them less than what they need Sunday after Sunday.
At its heart, this is what Deacon King Kong is all about: the paradox of Jesus carving his victory out of the last thing we expect, not our triumphs but our defeats.
You are not in debt to sin. You don’t owe it anything. There’s no reason for you to serve it.
Viewing the Word as a unified theological narrative prevents us from treating the Scriptures like a cage match between competing theological systems, with prophets duking it out with apostles, and psalmists with evangelists, all supposedly fighting for their voice to be heard.
Meeting the crown prince is one thing; meeting God in the flesh, as the Light of the Gentiles and the Savior of the world is another.
Christ has received the mark of law that we might be marked with the gospel, with the sign of his holy cross on our heads and hearts as redeemed children of God.
While the world and other religions might be fine with considering him everything but, the foremost thing our Jesus came to be and still remains is Jesus, Savior.
Buried deep in our human psyche, there seems to be more than a need—almost a necessity—to celebrate the arrival of a new year. It’s like an unspoken, unlegislated cultural demand, as instinctual as moving to music or smiling at a newborn. Why? What deep human need is at work here?
As Christians, we rest in the finished work of Christ on the cross, and we yearn for our neighbor to be reconciled to God, to know the peace that we are resting in.
Isaiah speaks to our time. He speaks to our rejoicing now and an anticipated joy-filled future. Christ’s coming, Christmas, brings them both.