A church with the truth of the gospel in its theology can produce the opposite of the gospel in its practice.

That church needs a fresh rediscovery of his gospel in all its beauty. It needs to prayerfully reconsider everything it believes and practices. Nothing is gained by merely repackaging the church in forms more attractive to outsiders.

The problem was not what they believed doctrinally but what they had become personally, and they didn’t even realize it.

Why a city? Partly because heaven shouldn’t be a city. Cain invented the city as his way of running from God (Gen. 4:17). A man-made city is more than a collection of buildings. It is a mechanism for living without having to depend on God. You can be on your own in a city. You can hide in a city. But what does God do with our strategy for evading

Too often we regard God’s power as an added ingredient that turbocharges our own efforts.

The gospel is not the story of Christ loving a pure bride who loves him; it’s the story of his love for a whore who thinks he has nothing to offer and keeps giving herself to others.

Let’s set all lesser things aside and prayerfully, before the Lord, rediscover his powerful gospel, while we still can.

At times, admittedly, our hearts still feel that we remain in a precarious position with God. We fear he will let us down. So we fall back into scurrying about to fill our emptiness with our own resources. But God graciously lets us wear ourselves out, and these efforts come to nothing.

So let me ask you a simple question: To whom do you submit? Every one of us should have a good answer to that. The Bible goes so far as to say, “Respect those who . . . are over you in the Lord” (1 Thess. 5:12).