When we despair of ourselves, we repent of these self-justifying schemes and allow ourselves to be shaped by God, covered in Christ’s righteousness, and reborn with a new heart.
This is the first in a series of articles entitled “Getting Over Yourself for Lent.” We’ll have a new article every week of this Lenten Season.
We can’t remove our crosses or the reality of our deaths. Only Jesus can.

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We cannot scan any random passage of Scripture and automatically assume the words are unconditionally addressed to us. Often, very often, they are not.
Rituals resist domestication and confront us with a world and worldview brought forth from the Bible and through twenty centuries of Christianity for the purpose of arresting our contemporary worldview through its self-sameness.
Praying this prayer every day reveals this painful truth, I am guilty in need of forgiveness every day.
In this season of a global pandemic, Peter’s little letter is especially potent as he writes to sustain the hope born of Christ’s resurrection in scattered believers whose lives were marked by suffering.
When talking about God’s ultimate destination for us, we’ve grown sloppy in our language, nearsighted in our gaze, and un-Easter in our hope. We act and speak as if dying and going to heaven is what the faith is all about. It is most emphatically not.
In our search for absolution, human beings leave no stone unturned. We’re desperate to have our uneasy consciences soothed.
The Son of Eve disarmed Satan’s hold on humanity, not with an earthquake, atomic bomb, or brilliant essay, but with his dead body and final words, “It is finished.”
The kingdom of God is not a place, a thing, a concept, a philosophy, a spiritual force, or a state of being. The kingdom of God is a person.
God invites us to have intimate conversations in a world filled with mockery and hate. To trust Jesus reigns whenever and wherever He extends a word of promise to the displaced and the disfavored, welcoming them home.
It is in the midst of a world marked by empty and deceptive hopes that have broken hearts and lives that we are sent to deliver the promise of a future that has as its last chapter the resurrection of the body to eternal life with the Lamb who was slain but is alive forevermore.
By pouring out his life unto death, Jesus reverses our death.
Whether your hearers are lifelong church-goers or recent converts, following Jesus is not a casual pastime. It is not simply one more thing we do.