Lael Johnson

You want to try something new, but you worry you’ll be bad at it—you fear you’ll humiliate yourself—and so you never start. But I knew that a fear-driven life was one where I never made plans, where I stopped myself from dreaming ambitiously. It meant living safe and small, always hedging against the worst-case scenario. Instead, I wanted to live b

vindicate me by your might.

In another place he speaks of both ourselves and God, carrying a “united witness” (Romans 8:16) to our divine identity—as “children of God,” “heirs,” and “coheirs with Christ” (8:17).2 When we stopped trusting this inner and united witness, we had no support in believing the central Gospel message itself—that we share in the same identity as Jesus

unworthiness. Render to God the things that are God’s (see Mt 22:21) and attribute to yourself what is yours. That is, give thanks to God for his grace, ascribe to yourself only sin, and reflect that you must atone for your sins because of the punishment which is due.

And as long as a man is thinking of God as an examiner who has set him a sort of paper to do, or as the opposite party in a sort of bargain—as long as he is thinking of claims and counter-claims between himself and God—he is not yet in the right relation to Him. He is misunderstanding what he is and what God is. And he cannot get into the right rel

That he had placed his sins between him and God, to tell Him that he did not deserve His favors, but that God still continued to bestow them, sometimes taking him by the hand and showing him to the court of Heaven, that all could see the wretch He was pleased to honor.

he tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong.