“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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Seeing, we do not see. Our eyes are busy deceiving us 24/7, like two liars sunk into our faces, calling black white and white black. To see God's work in our world, our eyes must retire and our ears labor overtime.
My life will be unwritten, erased by the hand of mortality. And fool that I am, I stand here threatening to snuff out the life of a woman caught in the act which I have acted out in my heart with a thousand women.
The entire life of believers is one of repentance.
I’ve come to realize at the tender age of 47 that sometimes church doesn’t work.
The wine of communion is a gift from God and the blood of Christ we receive at the rail an inebriant that encourages and frees us.
The thing is, not only is fixing our past impossible; who’s to say we wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes? In fact, who’s to say we wouldn’t make matters even worse?
I am lord of all I eat. I lord it over meat, potatoes, pecan pie. I make those foods serve my body, transforming them into me. But it is not so with the meal of Jesus.
In this particular church, all sins are forgiven, but some sins are more forgiven than others.
I hoped like mad they’d spit in my face and laugh me all the way out of town. I wouldn’t have even cared if a mob of them had beat me to death in a back alley. But heavens no, I couldn’t be that lucky.
Of all the words this woman ever spoke, these alone are chiseled forever into the stone of holy writ, and into the church’s memory. Mrs. Job becomes the patron saint of quick-tongued women.
It shows the extent to which an environment of iniquity can seep into the souls of believers, transforming them from the inside out, so that even when they “flee to the mountains,” like Lot and his girls, they take Sodom with them.
But when I let my mind go there, in truth all I’m doing is this: bellying up to the bar of sentimentality to drink my fill of falsehoods that leave me intoxicated with feelings of saintly superiority.