him. Let him love you. The Christian life boils down to two steps: 1. Go to Jesus. 2. See #1. Whatever is crumbling all around you in your life, wherever you feel stuck, this remains, un-deflectable: his heart for you, the real you, is gentle and lowly. So go to him. That place in your life where you feel most defeated, he is there; he lives there,

That which keeps men off is, that they know not Christ’s mind and heart. . . . The truth is, he is more glad of us than we can be of him. The father of the prodigal was the forwarder of the two to that joyful meeting. Have you a mind? He that came down from heaven, as himself says in the text, to die for you, will meet you more than halfway, as the

As a character says in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, reflecting biblical teaching: “That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”

It means that our fallenness now is not an obstacle to enjoying heaven. It is the key ingredient to enjoying heaven. Whatever mess we have made of our life—that’s part of our final glory and calm and radiance.

To say the same truth backward: Jesus didn’t die for us once we became strong (5:6); he didn’t die for us once we started to overcome our sinfulness (5:8); God did not reconcile us to himself once we became friendly toward him (5:10). God didn’t meet us halfway.

The felt love of Christ really is what brings rest, wholeness, flourishing, shalom—that existential calm that for brief, gospel-sane moments settles over you and lets you step in out of the storm of of-works-ness. You see for a moment that in Christ you truly are invincible. The verdict really is in; nothing can touch you. He has made you his own

There is an entire psychological substructure that, due to the fall, is a near-constant manufacturing of relational leveraging, fear-stuffing, nervousness, score-keeping, neurotic controlling, anxiety-festering silliness that is not something we say or even think so much as something we exhale. You can smell it on people, though some of us are good

The purpose of this chapter, through reflecting on the book of Galatians, is to bring the heart of Christ to bear on our chronic tendency to function out of a subtle belief that our obedience strengthens the love of God. We act like that twelve-year-old. And our Father responds with corrective love.

That God is rich in mercy means that your regions of deepest shame and regret are not hotels through which divine mercy passes but homes in which divine mercy abides. It means the things about you that make you cringe most, make him hug hardest. It means his mercy is not calculating and cautious, like ours. It is unrestrained, flood-like, sweeping,