Realizing the love of God for us produces love for God in us. Imagine you arrived home one afternoon to find a friend waiting on the porch. As you unlocked the door to go inside, he says, “Oh, while you were out, a creditor came by, demanding that you pay your debt. So I paid it for you.” How would you react to that person? If your friend had paid

So we should look to the Word of God and the Holy Spirit to inform and guide us as we pray.

I believe everyone’s “life goals” should include a few of those Godsized things. If everything you do is explainable by natural giftings, then at your funeral people will likely give you credit for your accomplishments. But if God does things through you that are “impossible with men,” then at your funeral your friends are likely to give God the

Don’t miss that. The way we first received the Spirit is also how we grow “more full” in him. We received the Spirit not by asking for him, but by believing the gospel. So if we want to grow in the Spirit, we don’t just plead for more of the Spirit — we put renewed faith in the gospel! Fullness of the Spirit, you see, is the byproduct of believing

I’ve had to learn this the hard way. As I noted earlier, I have spent most of my life feeling guilty about what I was not doing, rather than feeling grateful and joyful in doing what God had told me to do. But as I have begun to discover what it means to walk with the Spirit, I have learned to focus on staying more attentive to him, more in tune

Ours, you see, is a posture of active waiting, in which we gratefully offer ourselves in full surrender to God to be used in his mission. As we do that, he guides.

When we posture ourselves as co-Messiahs, we feel the strain of the world pressing down hard on our shoulders. And we can’t bear it. Of course we feel burned out! We’re trying to play God, a burden he did not design us to sustain.

The more you grow in your knowledge of the gospel, the more intimate you will become with the Spirit. Numerous places in the Bible teach this, though sometimes we read right past them. At least I did, for years.

If you knew God had appointed you to do something, and had anointed you for it, and was working in you to accomplish it, wouldn’t that produce an enormous amount of confidence?