If you are going to reach for the life-giving promises of the gospel, you must also celebrate the absolute rule of the One who, because of his rule, is able to deliver those promises to you. Hope is not found just in the beauty of those promises, but in the incalculable power and authority of the One who has made them.

We buy into this one fateful thought, that perhaps we’re smarter than God, that maybe our way is better than his way. Only grace can deliver the deluded from the danger that they are to themselves.

Do we value God’s grace, or would we rather have comfortable lives—nice houses, cars, vacations, cuisine, and friends? What gift could Jesus offer you that would make you want to make him your King? Humbly meditate on this question today. Could it be that you want him to be your King for all the wrong reasons? If your answer is yes, don’t run and

If you’re not looking at your relationships through the lens of God’s amazing grace, you’re not seeing those relationships accurately. So gathering after gathering is intended to so enthrall you with the grandeur of God’s grace that you can’t think of anything better than being a tool of that grace in the lives of others.

Hope in God is sure hope. When you hope in the Lord, you not only hope in the One who created and controls the universe, but also in One who is glorious in grace and abounding in love. Now, that’s hope that is well placed and will never disappoint.

I tell people all the time that we don’t just live in big, important moments. We make only a few grand decisions in our entire lives. Most of us won’t have a biography written about us. After we die, most of our personal history will die with us, forgotten. We live in little moments, so the character of our relationships is not set in three or four

If you fail to take seriously what the Bible says about who we are and about the nature of the world we live in, you will live with unrealistic expectations, you’ll be naive when it comes to temptation, and you’ll find yourself regularly surprised and disappointed.

There is often a separation between, on the one hand, the doctrines we say we have embraced and, on the other hand, the choices we make and the anxieties that we feel.

This honest psalm doesn’t begin with trouble; it begins with the most important declaration that anyone who faces trouble could ever hear: “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (vv. 1–2).