Sublime

Without the rescue of God’s grace, we are all wise fools heading for danger we simply don’t see. So we eat more than we should while denying the physical, empirical evidence of our foolishness. We spend ourselves into hopeless debt and are surprised when we can no longer pay our bills. We live selfishly and judgmentally in relationships and then

She lived in the midst of God’s most treasured souls: the poor, the disregarded, and the humiliated. She had made her schoolhouse into a humble kingdom of acceptance,

“In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.” That is second-half-of-life, hard-won wisdom.

Undercurrent here is the judgment that the one denying self in favor of another is in the spiritually superior position.

fear. It happens to people wrapped up in themselves. Those who believe the gospel—who believe that they are the recipients of undeserved but unshakable grace—grow in a paradoxically loving yet joyful fear.

Jesus came not to give us guilt but to give us life. We never fully arrive at the perfect lives or the perfect world we hope for, which is why grace is so magnificent. But we still must strive to see our hypocrisies and contradictions become less and less each day. We are all bound up in the filthy system, and if you find yourself particularly

God smiles when we trust him completely.

Sooner or later, a man must find that he cannot do enough, give enough, serve enough, or work hard enough in church or ministry to make God love him more. He can only allow himself to be loved freely. That’s what the Father is looking for — not performance but a receptive heart. The one leads to burnout. The other leads to burning bright.