“The fear of the Lord” is our heart’s awakening to and recognition of God’s outrageous goodness.
The women at the tomb were surprised by Easter. Amazed and filled with wonder at Jesus' Easter eucatastrophe. And so are we.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 6 in Sinner Saint: A Surprising Primer to the Christian Life (1517 Publishing, 2025). Sinner Saint is available today from 1517 Publishing.

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Little do we know the ancient and everlasting healing powers of God’s beloved tender shoot.
Character development? Change? Saying that it’s behind you? Yeah right. You’re just saying that because you want your nice polished image back. You haven’t changed. We know. We’ve got the receipts.
We forget that Christians need the Gospel. Not as a side note, but as the front-page headline.
God doesn’t give us second chances. No one earns another shot at forgiveness. We cannot earn forgiveness, it’s too costly.
What does it take to be a Christian? Christ.
We’ve become experts at making deals with God.
A truly Christian work is it that we descend and get mixed up in the mire of the sinner, taking his sin upon ourselves and floundering out of it with him, not acting otherwise than as if his sin were our own.
Even as children of God, we have down days. That’s just a fact of being sinful and living in an evil world.
Only when we stand where God has located Himself for us do we find an imperishable promise.
Jesus continues to breathe His gifts on His beloved. He continues to breathe absolution upon sinners like me and you, He continues to fill us with the Holy Spirit and all His comfort.
Jesus is our confidence because he reveals truth from falsehood, right from wrong, and reality from appearance, so that we may rely on him for our every need of body, soul, and mind.
Sometimes I think I've gone through the whole forgiveness process, but forgiveness for me often feels like I'm weeding my garden. I forgive and another offense pops up.