We can bring our troubles, griefs, sorrows, and sins to Jesus, who meets us smack dab in the middle of our messy mob.
Confession isn’t a detour in the liturgy. It’s the doorway.
American religion did not become optional because the gospel failed. It became optional because religion slowly redefined itself around usefulness.

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What does it mean that holding to Jesus’ teaching will set us free? Which teaching? What will we be set free from?
David is unable to find an example to accurately compare the purity that flows from God washing a sinner. The winter snow is the best example David can come up with, but it still falls short.
Viewing the Bible as literature is an essential and natural way of engaging the text. But there are also ways in which this practice can get lost.
From the junkyard of my past, I assembled the scrap metal of self-preservation, self-righteousness, and unalloyed selfishness, to weld together a hollow divinity. In its core, I stuffed myself: a god without divinity, offering forgiveness with conditions, to sinners without love.
The gospel fires up within us the gratitude, joy, and love to pull off what the law never could get us to do.
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.
God doesn’t give us second chances. No one earns another shot at forgiveness. We cannot earn forgiveness, it’s too costly.
We’ve become experts at making deals with God.
This is an excerpt adapted from “Let the Bird Fly” written by Wade Johnston (1517 Publishing, 2019).
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.
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.
There is no justification except by faith alone. The radical forgiveness itself puts the old to death and calls forth the new.