A rightly-oriented heart and a rightly-oriented love will consistently do what is best for God and best for our neighbor, which is why St. Augustine speaks of sin as a disordered love.
For Bonhoeffer, Christ crucified, and the cross of the Christian life were not of peripheral importance, but foundational.
While we often talk about our growth, our progress, and what we are doing for the kingdom of God, the reality is that any goodness in a Christian does not originate in us.

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Your justification isn’t a matter of “Jesus plus” anything.
Do our petitions move God?
The Lord has remembered to help his servant Israel, to fulfill his promises to Abraham and to his offspring forever, not mostly or mainly because of his mercy, but exclusively so.
This week, we’ll take a closer look at what it means to have a God who remembers us. Today, 1517 Scholar in Residence Chad Bird first introduces the Old Testament meaning behind the word and the Hebrew way of remembering.
In that moment of greatest despair, we find the antidote for all our fears. We know we are beloved of God and there is salvation in Christ’s atoning death.
Jesus weeps because his heart pulses with furious rage and fierce love.
While midnight might seem long, the mercy of God assures us that the morning will come.
Everything in Scripture is God revealing himself to his people, you and me.
The Parable of the Lost Sheep bursts through the confines of convention and demands that we embrace the messiness of life and the unpredictable ways in which God's grace and forgiveness operates.
His successes were not the result of his brilliance, might, and ability as an apostle. They were the result of the all-sufficient grace of God.
No matter how far away they wander, God always hears the prayers of his children.
When we forget that we live by promise, that's when the danger tends to creep in. Because failing to embrace promise means we usually fall back into notions of luck, or even worse--into works.