“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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A Sermon on Psalm 130:3–6.
Our experience with good fathers – even when they are not our own – can point us to God the Father.
Jesus meets us in our life of lies, in our falsehoods, in the untruth of our being, and in the company, we create to cover up our nakedness.
This book is for people who want to get serious about the church. It’s for pastors who are sick and tired of surfing the latest wave or jumping from one program to the other.
The emphasis for All Saints Sunday is not on the saints, but the Sanctifier, Jesus Christ.
The same Spirit who gives us his overabundant life has also given us doctrine. Scripture and Spirit cannot be put in opposition to each other.
The tragedy of the incidental Christ I was raised with is that he was really no Savior at all.
Erasmus sought to find meaning behind the words of Scripture in order to make an ultimate claim. Luther, on the other hand, found the Gospel to be meaningless outside of Christ and his Cross.
One could reason that God might, at least, give the church a little worldly power.
While the insights in each chapter are uniquely personal to the individual writers, the overarching theme is one of the sufficiency of Christ.
Wilson reminds his reader over and over again that, in his love, God accepts sinners as they are so that we may be delivered from the self-acceptance, self-worship, and self-justification of our selfish definitions of love.
When we — sinful, reprehensible we — become the enforcers of justice, we never bring about true justice. We either go too far or not far enough.