Christ Centered Life Quotes

But whatever you do, find the God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion of your life, and find your way to say it and live for it and die for it. And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste your life.

The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creation. Not to make people with better morals but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love. This, my friend, is what it really means to be a Christian.

Your approval before God is woven into the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, not what other men and women think about you.

Failure to deal with the presence of sin can often be traced back to spiritual amnesia – forgetting our new, true, real identity. As a believer, I am someone who has been delivered from the dominion of sin and who therefore is free and motivated to fight against the remnants of sin in my heart. You must know, rest in, think through, and act upon your new identity – you are in Christ

The personal desolation Christ is experiencing on the cross is what you and I should be experiencing--but instead, Jesus is bearing it, and bearing it all alone. Why alone? He's alone so that we might never be alone.

As the early church fathers delighted in saying, Christ took what was ours so that we might receive what was His.

Life [can] become unbalanced, and in the process God gets pushed to the fringes. Instead of staying at the center of our lives, Christ gradually gets relegated to the shadows. Don’t let this happen to you!

Some religions draw by force of arms; He would draw by force of love. The attraction would not be His words, but Himself. It was His Person around which His teaching centered; not His teaching around which He would be remembered. 'Greater love than this no man hath' - that was the secret of His magnetism.

At the end of life, each of us must answer the question, Whose story captured my soul?

The sun of God's glory was made to shine at the center of the solar system of our soul. And when it does, all the planets of our life are held in their proper orbit.

The Christian story, centered as it is on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the only story for making sense of desire and loss.

True enduring happiness with the accompanying strength, courage, and capacity to overcome the most challenging difficulties comes from a life centered in Jesus Christ.

So long as Jesus Christ is there, in heaven before God for us, our salvation will last.

God protects us from Satan even at times when we are not aware of His protection. But how can we develop Jesus-like discernment? By Spirit-aided digestion of the solid food of God's wisdom.

Here are wonders upon wonders: the Strong One is weak; the Infinite One lies in a manger; the Prince of Life dies; the Crucified One lives; the Humiliated One is glorified. Meekness and majesty, indeed! Behold, then, your newborn King! Come and worship Him!

As difficult as it might be at times, we have the ability to choose our attitude at any time for the good. When someone gets under our skin, we can be impatient and vindictive or we can exercise the virtue of kindness. It’s especially important to remember this when we don’t feel like it because that’s when it becomes sacrifice.

A cross centered life is made up of Christ centered days.

Every one of us can honestly claim that "worst of sinners" title. No, it isn't specially reserved for the Adolf Hitlers, Timothy McVeighs, and Osama bin Ladens of the world. William Law writes, "We may justly condemn ourselves as the greatest sinners we know because we know more of the folly of our own heart than we do of other people's." So admit you're the worst sinner you know. Admit you're unworthy and deserve to be condemned. But don't stop there! Move on to rejoicing in the Savior who came to save the worst of sinners. Lay down the luggage of condemnation and kneel down in worship at the feet of Him who bore your sins. Cry tears of amazement. And confess with Paul: "I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life" (1 Timothy 1:16)

One does not surrender a life in an instant - that which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime. Nor is surrender to the will of God (per se) adequate to fullness of power in Christ. Maturity is the accomplishment of years, and I can only surrender to the will of God as I know what that willl is. This may take years to know, hence fullness of the Spirit is not instantaneous but progressive as I attain fullness of the Word which reveals the will. If men were filled with the Spirit, they would not write books that subject, but on the Person whom the Spirit has come to reveal. Occupation with Christ is God's object, not fullness of the Spirit. The apostles saw the effects - Christ exalted - and noted the cause. Then they realized and exhorted to fullness of the Comforter. Then they realized and exhorted, no toe fullness, not with fullness as the goal, but merely as the path to that great aim of a Christ-centered soul - drawing attendtion to its center.

The greatest threat to Christ-centered witness even in churches that formally affirm sound teaching is what British evangelical David Gibson calls ‘the assumed gospel.’ The idea is that the gospel is necessary for getting saved, but after we sign on, the rest of the Christian life is all the fine print: conditional forgiveness.

Anyone who is in Christ is strategically positioned to win the most coveted award in this business called life. He doesn't want you playing itty-bitty roles. He wants bright lights in your dressing room, and the spotlight trained on you as you take the center stage.

The work of atonement took place in the presence of the God of heaven. Indeed, it involved a transaction within the fellowship of the persons of the eternal Trinity in their love for us: the Son was willing, with the aid of the Spirit, to experience the hiding of the Father's face. The shedding of the blood of God's Son opened the way to God for us (Acts 20:28). That is both the horror and the glory of our Great High Priest's ministry. Terrible

The body of Christ is about doing life together, and by doing life together sin is revealed.

Seeing human need with perfect clarity, Jesus felt it with unparalleled intensity.

That life begins with God's working, not with our "doing.

First importance. The Bible tells us that, while there are many different callings and many possible areas of service in the kingdom of God, one transcendent truth should define our lives. One simple truth should motivate our work and affect every part of who we are. Christ died for our sins. If there's anything in life that we should be passionate about, it's the gospel. And I don't mean passionate only about sharing it with others. I mean passionate in thinking about it, dwelling on it, rejoicing in it, allowing it to color the way we look at the world. Only one thing can be of first importance to each of us. And only the gospel ought to be.

Faith is not the ground or basis upon which we are justified, but the means, the "instrument," by which we are united to Christ, in whom our justification, our "right-wising" with God, has been accomplished.

The cross was the centerpiece of Paul’s theology. It wasn’t merely one of Paul’s messages; it was the message. He taught about other things as well, but whatever he taught was always derived from, and related to, the foundational reality that Jesus Christ died so that sinners would be reconciled to God and forgiven by God.

When we begin to reflect Christ, the Bible, when more understood as being centered around Christ, seems to be potentially every man's biography regarding God's promised experiences and truth for him - his individual, unique path of humbling oneself before the Lord and then being exalted by the Lord back into his true and righteous personhood. Many followers may speak of it merely to try to change other people (before changing themselves), but the prophets speak of it as a living word which miraculously tells their very own experiences.

As difficult as it might be at times, we have the ability to choose our attitude at any time for the good. When someone gets under our skin, we can be impatient and vindictive or we can exercise the virtue of kindness.

I've thought all my life, 'Lord Christ in heaven! what did I live for?' Beatings, work! I saw nothing except my husband. I knew nothing but fear! And how Pasha grew I did not see, and I hardly know whether I loved him when my husband was alive. All my concerns, all my thoughts were centered upon one thing—to feed my beast, to propitiate the master of my life with enough food, pleasing to his palate, and served on time, so as not to incur his displeasure, so as to escape the terrors of a beating, to get him to spare me but once! But I do not remember that he ever did spare me. He beat me so—not as a wife is beaten, but as one whom you hate and detest.

Go back to the school in which you will make progress in being a Christian. Study your lessons, settle the issue of ambition, make Christ your preoccupation-and you will learn to enjoy the privileges of being truly content.

We never “get over” the gospel. We never “move beyond” the gospel. Why in the world would we even try to “move beyond” the beautiful truth that God loved the world by giving His Son that we could have eternal life with Him?

Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life (Philippians 4:6).

Children raised in a couple-centered home more fully understand the gospel of Jesus Christ. God’s love manifested in marriage speaks more to kids than any Sunday school lesson or sermon. This truth is the essence of Ephesians 5:25. Marriage is used as a word picture for God’s love for the church. What is your marriage teaching your kids about Jesus?

Set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God." (Colossians 3:1) This is a direct command to set our hearts on Heaven. And to make sure we don't miss the importance of a heaven-centered life, the next verse says, "Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things." God commands us to set our hearts and minds on Heaven.

the Son of God took our nature and came "in the likeness of sinful flesh" (Rom. 8:3) in order to exchange places with Adam, so that His obedience and righteousness might for our sakes be exchanged for Adam's (and our) disobedience and sin (Rom. 5:12-21). Exchange

God-given prayer and praise have as their essence a waiting on God, a willingness to be wrought upon by the hammer and the fire of the Almighty, until the chains of self-centered desires fall away from the personality, and the love of Christ become the deepest hunger of the inner life.

Third, hear our loss of focus on the gospel in our songs. This is no comment on musical styles and tastes, but simply an observation about the lyrical content of much that is being sung in churches today. In many cases, congregations unwittingly have begun to sing about themselves and how they are feeling rather than about God and His glory.

Living communion with God in which He is real, alive, fresh, and present to your soul energizes a God-centered life.

In healthy churches, the pastors life, not just his words, sets the tone for the church.

The role of biblical counselors is facilitate the discovery of a greater God awareness through spiritual eyes that look at life through scriptural lenses.

When we see salvation whole, its every single part is found in Christ, And so we must beware lest we derive the smallest drop from somewhere else.

Authentic gospel preaching always engages people with eternal issues.

We are here to rejoice together ‘in every good thing.’ It is the strength and joy from a Christ-centered and Christlike life that gives us reason to rejoice.

For if we seek salvation, the very name ofJesus teaches us that he possesses it.

Jesus used the carefree attitude of the birds to underscore the fact that worrying is unnatural. I am learning in my own life, day by day, to keep my mind centered on Christ.

Jesus' sinlessness should not be equated with emotionlessness.

In undiluted monergism, He called the galaxies into being, and He gives life to the dead in the same way

Self-centered love loves the other for the sake of itself; spiritual love loves the other for the sake of Christ.

I love the idea of a home in our hearts. A sanctuary of love and peace right in the center of our being. A place of inner beauty, inner peace, inner healing, inner rest, and so much more. A simple and quiet life can be a beautiful one when it’s paired with an abundant and cavernous inner world. And when Jesus is dwelling there in spirit, it’s certainly a place worth coming home to.

If I try by myself to swim across the ocean of this world, the waves will certainly engulf me. In order to survive I must climb aboard a ship made of wood; this wood is the Cross of Christ. Of course, even on board ship there will be dangerous tempests and perils from the sea of this world. But God will help me remain on board the ship and arrive safely at the harbor of eternal life.” - St. Augustine

Sweet friend, you don’t have to search for a different life in order to enjoy life; you simply have to embrace the one you have by putting Christ at the center and asking Him to help you enjoy life, despite life.

You go through that Gospel of John. He is centering everything in Himself. “I am the Way; I am the Truth; I am the Life; I am the Shepherd; I am the Vine; I am the Resurrection.” It is a Person. It is that which lies behind everything. Christianity is Christ. Christ is Christianity. That is where it all begins and it never departs from HIM. The development of the Christian life is only the development of Jesus Christ in the life. From:

Strong community is formed by powerful common experiences, as when people survive a flood or fight together in a battle. When they emerge on the other side, this shared experience becomes the basis for a deep, permanent bond that is stronger than blood. The more intense the experience, the more intense the bond. When we experience Christ’s radical grace through repentance and faith, it becomes the most intense, foundational event of our lives. Now, when we meet someone from a different culture, race, or social class who has received the same grace, we see someone who has been through the same life-and-death experience. In Christ, we have both spiritually died and been raised to new life (Rom 6:4 – 6; Eph 2:1 – 6). And because of this common experience of rescue, we now share an identity marker even more indelible than the ties that bind us to our family, our race, or our culture.

If I see God as nothing more than a caricature of history or imagination I cannot do anything less than make myself my own ‘god’. And once I realize that in doing so my rendition of being a ‘god’ is embarrassingly inferior to the very caricature I am mimicking, I quickly come to realize that maybe the only thing that can be ‘god’ is a God. And if that is the case, I suddenly find myself hounded by the stunning reality that God is not a caricature.

The Bible is different because it is the Word of God, by which He speaks to me. Disagreeing with the Bible would be disagreeing with God. So when I read the Bible I want to place myself ‘under’ it. I want to receive the Scripture in such a way that over time, my thinking, feeling, choosing, believing and behaving will be molded by the Word God is speaking into my life. I don’t want to critique the Scriptures; I want them to critique me and change me.

The False Self constructs all sorts of layers of ego and angst and striving and foolishness, while the True Self, deep at the center of a person, waits for the time when the False Self will die and allow the real life to begin.

Such contentment is never the result of the momentary decision of the will. It cannot be produced merely by having a well-ordered and thought-through time- and life-management plan calculated to guard us against unexpected twists of divine providence. No, true contentment means embracing the Lord's will in every aspect of His providence simply because it is His providence. It involves what we are in our very being, not just what we do and can accomplish.

One does not surrender a life in an instant - that which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime. Nor is surrender to the will of God (per se) adequate to fullness of power in Christ. Maturity is the accomplishment of years, and I can only surrender to the will of God as I know what that willl is. This may take years to know, hence fullness of the Spirit is not instantaneous but progressive as I attain fullness of the Word which reveals the will. If men were filled with the Spirit, they would not write books on that subject, but on the Person whom the Spirit has come to reveal. Occupation with Christ is God's object, not fullness of the Spirit. The apostles saw the effects - Christ exalted - and noted the cause, which was the blessed working of the Comforter. Then they realized and exhorted to fullness, not with fullness as the goal, but merely as the path to that great aim of a Christ-centered soul - drawing attendtion to its center.

The word "Christian" means 'like Christ'! We are to reflect His beauty, do His deeds, think His thoughts, and speak His words. This is what it means to become conformed into the image of Jesus Christ. Do we really understand to what we are committing ourselves when we sing the song 'To be like Jesus...All I ask, to be like Him'? Actually, we are asking for everything that Jesus is: His character, His work, His mind, His word, His beauty, power, wisdom, and will. This is a big order, but it is our destiny! This is what life is all about. To miss this is to miss everything. To gain this is to possess the answer to life's biggest question. Christ is the answer! God planned it so. The will of God the Father for you centers in His Son!

you cannot destroy love for the world merely by showing its emptiness. The world-centered love of our hearts can be expelled only by a new love and affection-for God and from God. The love of the world and the love of the Father cannot coexist in the same heart

Abiding time is extravagant daily time with Jesus. This extravagant time is the center of abiding. Not legalism, not dry discipline, not manufactured spirituality, but joyous soaking in the presence of Jesus, lavish spending of time with Him who is most precious, Him from whom all life flows. In a world that is over-connected yet lonely, frantically busy yet accomplishing little of eternal value, super-informed but egregiously ignorant on what really matters, abiding gives Jesus the best of our time, in which He leads us to the best of times.

Most churches do not grow beyond the spiritual health of their leadership. Many churches have a pastor who is trying to lead people to a Savior he has yet to personally encounter. If spiritual gifting is no proof of authentic faith, then certainly a job title isn't either. You must have a clear sense of calling before you enter ministry. Being a called man is a lonely job, and many times you feel like God has abandoned you in your ministry. Ministry is more than hard. Ministry is impossible. And unless we have a fire inside our bones compelling us, we simply will not survive. Pastoral ministry is a calling, not a career. It is not a job you pursue. If you don’t think demons are real, try planting a church! You won’t get very far in advancing God’s kingdom without feeling resistance from the enemy. If I fail to spend two hours in prayer each morning, the devil gets the victory through the day. Once a month I get away for the day, once a quarter I try to get out for two days, and once a year I try to get away for a week. The purpose of these times is rest, relaxation, and solitude with God. A pastor must always be fearless before his critics and fearful before his God. Let us tremble at the thought of neglecting the sheep. Remember that when Christ judges us, he will judge us with a special degree of strictness. The only way you will endure in ministry is if you determine to do so through the prevailing power of the Holy Spirit. The unsexy reality of the pastorate is that it involves hard work—the heavy-lifting, curse-ridden, unyielding employment of your whole person for the sake of the church. Pastoral ministry requires dogged, unyielding determination, and determination can only come from one source—God himself. Passive staff members must be motivated. Erring elders and deacons must be confronted. Divisive church members must be rebuked. Nobody enjoys doing such things (if you do, you should be not be a pastor!), but they are necessary in order to have a healthy church over the long haul. If you allow passivity, laziness, and sin to fester, you will soon despise the church you pastor. From the beginning of sacred Scripture (Gen. 2:17) to the end (Rev. 21:8), the penalty for sin is death. Therefore, if we sin, we should die. But it is Jesus, the sinless one, who dies in our place for our sins. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus died to take to himself the penalty of our sin. The Bible is not Christ-centered because it is generally about Jesus. It is Christ-centered because the Bible’s primary purpose, from beginning to end, is to point us toward the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus for the salvation and sanctification of sinners. Christ-centered preaching goes much further than merely providing suggestions for how to live; it points us to the very source of life and wisdom and explains how and why we have access to him. Felt needs are set into the context of the gospel, so that the Christian message is not reduced to making us feel better about ourselves. If you do not know how sinful you are, you feel no need of salvation. Sin-exposing preaching helps people come face-to-face with their sin and their great need for a Savior. We can worship in heaven, and we can talk to God in heaven, and we can read our Bibles in heaven, but we can’t share the gospel with our lost friends in heaven. “Would your city weep if your church did not exist?” It was crystal-clear for me. Somehow, through fear or insecurity, I had let my dreams for our church shrink. I had stopped thinking about the limitless things God could do and had been distracted by my own limitations. I prayed right there that God would forgive me of my small-mindedness. I asked God to forgive my lack of faith that God could use a man like me to bring the message of the gospel through our missionary church to our lost city. I begged God to renew my heart and mind with a vision for our city that was more like Christ's.

CHRISTMAS GREETINGS From Ray Bradbury Imagine that you have been dead for a year, ten years, one hundred years, a thousand years. The grave and night have taken and kept you in that silence and dark which says nothing and so reveals absolutely zero. In the middle of all this darkness and being alone and bereft of sense, let us imagine that God comes to your still soul and lonely body and says: I will give you one minute of ife. I will restore you to your body and senses for sixty seconds. Out of all the minutes in your life, choose one, I will put you in that minute, and you will be alive again after a hundred, a thousand years of darkness. Which is it? Think. Speak. Which do you choose? And the answer is: Any minute. Any minute at all! Oh, God, Sweet Christ, oh mystery, give me any minute in all my life. And the further answer is: When I lived I didn't know that every minute was special, precious a gift, a miracle, an incredible thing, an impossible work, an amazing dream. But not, Like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Morn, with snow in the air and the promise of rebirth given, I know what I should have known in my dumb shambles: That all is a lark, and it is a beauty beyond tears, and also a terror. But I dance about, I become a child, I am the boy who runs for the great bird in the window and I am the man who sends the boy running for that bird, and I am the life that blows in the snowing wind along that street, and the bells that sound and say: live, love, for too soon will your name which is shaped in the snow melt, of your soul which is inscribed like a breath of vapor on a cold glass pane fade. Run, run, lad, run, down the middle of Christmas at the center of life.

Evangelicals tend to be “crucicentric,” which means “centered on the cross.” And we fail to see the comprehensive nature of Christ’s work. As the early Christian bishop Irenaeus once argued, Christ moved through all stages of human life and experience and in this sense, recapitulated the life lived by humans. His holy obedience at every stage of human life created the possibility of a perfect humanity which he presented to the Father in his ascension. In his saving work, Jesus then became the author of a restored human race, something the world had never seen before.

The gospel that Paul is proclaiming in Romans does not center on the issue of sexuality. It focuses on the universality of sin and the free grace of salvation through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is the essence of the Christian message. Idolatry, Not Sexuality

The one true Church is composed of all believers in the Lord Jesus. It is made up of all Gods elect-of all converted men and women-of all true Christians. It is a Church of which all the members have the same marks. They are born of the Spirit; they all possess "repentance towards God, faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ", and holiness of life and conversation. They all hate sin, and they all love Christ. They all worship with one heart. They are all led by one Spirit; they all build upon one foundation; they all draw their religion from one single Book-that is the Bible. They are all joined to one great center-that is Jesus Christ. They all, even now, can say with one heart, “Hallelujah"; and they can all respond with one heart and voice, “Amen and Amen”. It is a Church which is dependent upon no ministers upon earth, however much it values those who preach the Gospel to its members.

True discernment means not only distinguishing the right from the wrong; it means distinguishing the primary from the secondary, the essential from the indifferent, and the permanent from the transient. And, yes, it means distinguishing between the good and the better, and even between the better and the best.

There’s an old Cherokee legend about two wolves at war. It’s good food for thought on the topic of self-control. One night a grandfather was teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.” The boy paused to think for a moment before looking up at his grandfather. “Which wolf will win?” He asked. The wise man simply replied, “The one that you feed.”  Hearing that story, I’m reminded of the scripture that says, And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. – Galatians 5:24

growing in faith and love for Christ, revealed as He is in Scripture, will be the greatest of all preservatives against being led astray. The person who is saturated in the teaching and spirit of the Gospels will have his or her senses "trained ... to distinguish good from evil" (Heb. 5:14, NIV) and to know what is truly Christ-like and Christ-honoring.

Jesus-centered spiritual formation is the process of being transformed into the image of Christ, through a relationship of intimacy with God, by the power of the Spirit, in order to live a good and beautiful life of faith, hope, love, joy, and peace—a life that will be a blessing to oneself and to others and will glorify God now and for all eternity. — James Bryan Smith

Underline this thought: assurance, peace, access to God, knowledge that He is our Father, and strength to overcome temptation all depend on this-the Son of God took our flesh and bore our sins in such a way that further sacrifice for sin is both unnecessary and unintelligible. Christ died our death, and now in His resurrection He continues to wear our nature forever, and in it He lives for us before the face of God. He could not do more for us than He has done; we need no other resources to enable us to walk through this world into the next. You and I need a Savior who is near us, is one with us, understands us. All of this the Lord Jesus is, Hebrews affirms. Fix your gaze on this Christ and your whole Christian life will be transformed.

There is a vast difference between being a Christian and being a disciple. The difference is commitment. Motivation and discipline will not ultimately occur through listening to sermons, sitting in a class, participating in a fellowship group, attending a study group in the workplace or being a member of a small group, but rather in the context of highly accountable, relationally transparent, truth-centered, small discipleship units. There are twin prerequisites for following Christ - cost and commitment, neither of which can occur in the anonymity of the masses. Disciples cannot be mass produced. We cannot drop people into a program and see disciples emerge at the end of the production line. It takes time to make disciples. It takes individual personal attention. Discipleship training is not about information transfer, from head to head, but imitation, life to life. You can ultimately learn and develop only by doing. The effectiveness of one's ministry is to be measured by how well it flourishes after one's departure. Discipling is an intentional relationship in which we walk alongside other disciples in order to encourage, equip, and challenge one another in love to grow toward maturity in Christ. This includes equipping the disciple to teach others as well. If there are no explicit, mutually agreed upon commitments, then the group leader is left without any basis to hold people accountable. Without a covenant, all leaders possess is their subjective understanding of what is entailed in the relationship. Every believer or inquirer must be given the opportunity to be invited into a relationship of intimate trust that provides the opportunity to explore and apply God's Word within a setting of relational motivation, and finally, make a sober commitment to a covenant of accountability. Reviewing the covenant is part of the initial invitation to the journey together. It is a sobering moment to examine whether one has the time, the energy and the commitment to do what is necessary to engage in a discipleship relationship. Invest in a relationship with two others for give or take a year. Then multiply. Each person invites two others for the next leg of the journey and does it all again. Same content, different relationships. The invitation to discipleship should be preceded by a period of prayerful discernment. It is vital to have a settled conviction that the Lord is drawing us to those to whom we are issuing this invitation. . If you are going to invest a year or more of your time with two others with the intent of multiplying, whom you invite is of paramount importance. You want to raise the question implicitly: Are you ready to consider serious change in any area of your life? From the outset you are raising the bar and calling a person to step up to it. Do not seek or allow an immediate response to the invitation to join a triad. You want the person to consider the time commitment in light of the larger configuration of life's responsibilities and to make the adjustments in schedule, if necessary, to make this relationship work. Intentionally growing people takes time. Do you want to measure your ministry by the number of sermons preached, worship services designed, homes visited, hospital calls made, counseling sessions held, or the number of self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Jesus? When we get to the shore's edge and know that there is a boat there waiting to take us to the other side to be with Jesus, all that will truly matter is the names of family, friends and others who are self initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Jesus because we made it the priority of our lives to walk with them toward maturity in Christ. There is no better eternal investment or legacy to leave behind.

Manifest in this trade (commercial sale of indulgences via bankers) at the same time was a pernicious tendency in the Roman Catholic system, for the trade in indulgences was not an excess or an abuse but the direct consequence of the nomistic degradation of the gospel. That the Reformation started with Luther’s protest against this traffic in indulgences proves its religious origin and evangelical character. At issue here was nothing less than the essential character of the gospel, the core of Christianity, the nature of true piety. And Luther was the man who, guided by experience in the life of his own soul, again made people understand the original and true meaning of the gospel of Christ. Like the “righteousness of God,” so the term “penitence” had been for him one of the most bitter words of Holy Scripture. But when from Romans 1:17 he learned to know a “righteousness by faith,” he also learned “the true manner of penitence.” He then understood that the repentance demanded in Matthew 4:17 had nothing to do with the works of satisfaction required in the Roman institution of confession, but consisted in “a change of mind in true interior contrition” and with all its benefits was itself a fruit of grace. In the first seven of his ninety-five theses and further in his sermon on “Indulgences and Grace” (February 1518), the sermon on “Penitence” (March 1518), and the sermon on the “Sacrament of Penance” (1519), he set forth this meaning of repentance or conversion and developed the glorious thought that the most important part of penitence consists not in private confession (which cannot be found in Scripture) nor in satisfaction (for God forgives sins freely) but in true sorrow over sin, in a solemn resolve to bear the cross of Christ, in a new life, and in the word of absolution, that is, the word of the grace of God in Christ. The penitent arrives at forgiveness of sins, not by making amends (satisfaction) and priestly absolution, but by trusting the word of God, by believing in God’s grace. It is not the sacrament but faith that justifies. In that way Luther came to again put sin and grace in the center of the Christian doctrine of salvation. The forgiveness of sins, that is, justification, does not depend on repentance, which always remains incomplete, but rests in God’s promise and becomes ours by faith alone.

Every action is a losing, a letting go, a passing away from oneself of some bit of one’s own reality into the existence of others and of the world. In Jesus Christ, this character of action is not resisted, by trying to use our action to assert ourselves, extend ourselves, to impose our will and being upon situations. In Jesus Christ, this self-expending character of action is joyfully affirmed. I receive myself constantly from God’s Parenting love. But so far as some aspects of myself are at my disposal, these I receive to give away. Those who would live as Jesus did—who would act and purpose themselves as Jesus did—mean to love, i.e., they mean to expend themselves for others unto death. Their being is meant to pass away from them to others, and they make that meaning the conscious direction of their existence. Too often the love which is proclaimed in the churches suppresses this element of loss and need and death in activity. As a Christian, I often speak of love as helping others, but I ignore what this does to the person who loves. I ignore the fact that love is self-expenditure, a real expending and losing and deterioration of the self. I speak of love as if the person loving had no problems, no needs, no limits. In other words, I speak of love as if the affluent dream were true. This kind of proclamation is heard everywhere. We hear it said: 'Since you have no unanswered needs, why don’t you go out and help those other people who are in need?' But we never hear people go on and add: 'If you do this, you too will be driven into need.' And by not stating this conclusion, people give the childish impression that Christian love is some kind of cornucopia, where we can reach to everybody’s needs and problems and still have everything we need for ourselves. Believe me, there are grown-up persons who speak this kind of nonsense. And when people try to live out this illusory love, they become terrified when the self-expending begins to take its toll. Terror of relationship is [that] we eat each other. But note this very carefully: like Jesus, we too can only live to give our received selves away freely because we know our being is not thereby ended, but still and always lies in the Parenting of our God.... Those who love in the name of Jesus Christ... serve the needs of others willingly, even to the point of being exposed in their own neediness.... They do not cope with their own needs. They do not anguish over how their own needs may be met by the twists and turns of their circumstances, by the whims of their society, or by the strategies of their own egos. At the center of their life—the very innermost center—they are grateful to God, because... they do not fear neediness. That is what frees them to serve the needy, to companion the needy, to become and be one of the needy.

The essence of Christianity is centered upon the Lord Jesus Christ. The sum and substance of being a Christian is trusting Christ with the entirety of one’s being. The height of the Christian life is adoring Christ, the depth of it loving Him, the breadth of it obeying Him, and the length of it following Him. Everything in the Christian life revolves around Jesus Christ. Simply put, Christianity is Christ.

Before all time; prior to all worlds; when there was nothing "outside of" God Himself; when the Father, Son, and Spirit found eternal, absolute, and unimaginable blessing, pleasure, and joy in Their holy triunity-it was Their agreed purpose to create a world. That world would fall. But in unison-and at infinitely great cost-this glorious triune God planned to bring you (if you are a believer) grace and salvation.

We must cling to the gospel promise that God is pleased with us because he is pleased with Jesus. When we embrace the gospel in this way, seeing our sin is not scary or embarrassing. It actually leads to worship because Jesus has died for all of it, and it is liberating because we are no longer defined by it! Our righteousness is in Christ. The good news of the gospel is not that God makes much of us, but that God frees us to make much of Jesus.

Jesus evokes extreme reactions. Some are so furious with him they try to throw him off a cliff and kill him. Others are so terrified they cry out, “Depart. . . . Get away from me!”5 Others fall down before him and worship him. Why the extremes? It is because of the claims about who he is. If he is who he said he is, then you have to center your whole life on him. And if he is not who he said he is, then he is someone to hate or run away from. But no other response makes any sense. Either he is God or he isn’t—so he’s absolutely crazy or infinitely wonderful. The modern world, however, is filled with people who say they believe in Jesus, they say they understand who he is, but it hasn’t revolutionized their lives. There has been no crisis and lasting change. The only way to explain this is that, contrary to what they claim, they haven’t really grasped the meaning that he is “God with us.” IT

The gospel is “heraldic proclamation” before it is anything else.20 It is news that creates a life of love, but the life of love is not itself the gospel. The gospel is not everything that we believe, do, or say. The gospel must primarily be understood as good news, and the news is not as much about what we must do as about what has been done. The gospel is preeminently a report about the work of Christ on our behalf — salvation accomplished for us.

I want to highlight the spirit of Pope Francis. Elected to the papacy following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis (Jose Maria Bergoglio), in his late seventies, brings a new spirit to the Church that reflects a consciousness of catholicity that we explore here. His is an inner spirit of freedom grounded in the love of God, guided by the gospel message of the new kingdom at hand, and open to a world of change. He desires a Church on the margins, where the poor and the forgotten can be brought into a new unity; a Church that advocates life at all costs and promotes peaceful life in a war-torn and violent world; a Church that models justice in an age of greed, consumerism, and power; a Church centered on the risen Christ, empowering a consciousness of the whole. This is a church leader who desperately wants to breathe a new spirit of catholicity into a world dying for wholeness and unity.

Two transformations are at the center of this life. For want of better language, I call them the personal and the political. The Christian life is about personal transformation into the likeness of Christ (from one degree to another, as Paul puts it); and it is about participation in God’s passion for the kingdom of God. The personal and the political are brought together in “the way of the cross”—an image of personal transformation and confrontation with the domination systems of this world.

our home is not our refuge; God is our refuge. We nurture life in the face of death and leverage our homes for gospel work. For those whose hope is in the coming kingdom, our homes are less like retreats and more like a network of foxholes for planning and hosting kingdom advances into this present darkness. Our homes are centers of hospitality to show strangers and neighbors the light of Christ. And they are equipping centers for traveling ambassadors to help them on their way to doing the King’s business.

The genius of the divine way of salvation by faith is that in it we are personally, actively united to Jesus Christ, but in a way that contributes nothing to His work. Faith is by definition noncontributory; it is the reception of Christ, not an addition to His finished work. B. B. Warfield finely puts it this way: It is not faith that saves, but faith in Jesus Christ.... It is not, strictly speaking, even faith in Christ that saves, but Christ that saves through faith. The saving power resides exclusively, not in the act of faith or the attitude of faith or in the nature of faith, but in the object of faith.14 In this sense, even though we are actively involved in faith, we are passive with respect to the accomplishing of justification. In the deepest sense, then, it is by grace that we are saved through faith, and that (whether the grace, the faith, or the union of the two in justification) is the gift of God; it is not of works, lest anyone should boast (Eph. 2:8-9; notice the reiteration of the theme of non-boasting of Rom. 3:27).

At its core, sinfulness is selfishness. It's enthroning yourself - your desires, your needs, your plans - above all else. You may still seek God, but you don't seek Him first. You seek Him second or third or seventh. You may sing "Jesus at the center of it all," but what you really want is for people to bow down to you as you bow down to Christ. It's a subtle form of selfishness that masquerades as spirituality, but it's not Christ-centric. It's me-centric. It's less about us serving His purposes and more about Him serving our purposes.

So I would like to suggest that the great spiritual battle of our time is not a struggle between believers and atheists. Rather, it is a struggle between pride and humility. We expect and even demand humility in most areas of life—what really matters is what is objectively true, not what any of us might think is true. Our opinions are not what is important. Yet when it comes to ultimate questions about ourselves and the nature of existence, about the meaning of life, we set aside humility and place ourselves at the center of the universe.

Jesus Christ is the divine, eternal Son of God, who became a member of the human race by virgin birth. He led a sinless life, died on the cross as a propitiatory sacrifice for the sins of humanity, was buried and rose again in bodily form from the grave on the third day. He ascended into heaven, whence He will return to earth in person, to judge the living and the dead. Everyone who repents of sin and trusts in the sacrifice of Jesus receives forgiveness of sins and the gift of eternal life. It is important to emphasize that the Gospel centers

...when I look at stories I have written I find that they are, for the most part, about people who are poor, who are afflicted in both mind and body, who have little--or at best a distorted--sense of spiritual purpose, and whose actions do not apparently give the reader a great assurance of the joy of life. Yet how is this? For I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that.... My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable....I think that more often the reason for this attention to the perverse is the difference between their beliefs and the beliefs of the audience. Redemption is meaningless unless there is a cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.

The crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance. The resurrection is not a set piece. It is not an isolated demonstration of divine dazzlement. It is not to be detached from its abhorrent first act. The resurrection is, precisely, the vindication of a man who was crucified. Without the cross at the center of the Christian proclamation, the Jesus story can be treated as just another story about a charismatic spiritual figure. It is the crucifixion that marks out Christianity as something definitively different in the history of religion. It is in the crucifixion that the nature of God is truly revealed. Since the resurrection is God's mighty transhistorical Yes to the historically crucified Son, we can assert that the crucifixion is the most important historical event that has ever happened. The resurrection, being a transhistorical event planted within history, does not cancel out the contradiction and shame of the cross in this present life; rather, the resurrection ratifies the cross as the way "until he comes.

Can you take in what you have overheard in the High Priestly Prayer of John 17? It is like a light momentarily switched on in a darkened room and then extinguished. Did you really see such treasures? Has Jesus actually prayed that my faith will not fail (Luke 22:31-32) and that I will be kept by God's power for such glory (1 Peter 1:5-11)? Is even my name engraved on His shoulders and inscribed on His heart? Do you understand how much your High Priest cares for you and loves you? It is almost as though He were saying, "Father, My glory will be incomplete unless You keep this promise-that My beloved disciples can see it and share it.

One admires Christ according to aesthetic categories as an aesthetic genius, calls him the greatest ethicist; one admires his going to his death as a heroic sacrifice for his ideas. Only one thing one doesn’t do: one doesn’t take him seriously. That is, one doesn’t bring the center of his or her own life into contact with the claim of Christ to speak the revelation of God and to be that revelation. One maintains a distance between himself or herself and the word of Christ, and allows no serious encounter to take place. I can doubtless live with or without Jesus as a religious genius, as an ethicist, as a gentleman—just as, after all, I can also live without Plato and Kant. . . . Should, however, there be something in Christ that claims my life entirely with the full seriousness that here God himself speaks and if the word of God once became present only in Christ, then Christ has not only relative but absolute, urgent significance for me. . . . Understanding Christ means taking Christ seriously. Understanding this claim means taking seriously his absolute claim on our commitment. And it is now of importance for us to clarify the seriousness of this matter and to extricate Christ from the secularization process in which he has been incorporated since the Enlightenment.

A free woman has a strong neck—an open connection between heart and head, a balance between reality and ideals. To fall into the complex is to damn herself for her imperfections; to accept the attitude of the virgin is to accept her human life and open herself to her own truth. Then Lucifer turns his other face; he becomes the Light Bringer, the Christ. So long as the virgin is unconscious, she is unable to surrender to Light. The very Light blocks her acceptance of herself and becomes the demon lover because she cannot receive. Once she is conscious enough to forgive her own and other people's imperfections, then her positive animus becomes the bridge between conscious and unconscious. Psychic incest is the energy source of creativity. Incorporating the Light at the center of the father complex is the soul work of the receptive virgin. In the Middle Ages, this task was symbolized in the taming of the unicorn. The unicorn symbolizes the creative power of the spirit, and was seen in medieval times as an allegory of Christ. Its energy is so fierce and so dangerous that only a virgin can tame it, and only then through deception. She must deliver it into the hands of the human hunters who kill it and allow its red blood to flow. In its transformed, resurrected state, the unicorn is the powerful energy contained in the virgin's holy garden.

No matter what room we find ourselves in, help us to remember that because of Christ: We are free to holler with the world changers. We are free to ponder with the contemplatives. We are free to campaign with the activists and be still with the liturgists. We are free to be quiet and free to be loud. We are free to live in the center, on the side, or in the back. We are free to go. We are free to stay home. We are free to linger and to leave early. We are free to dream big and free to dream small. We are free to draw boundaries and free to change our minds. There’s room at the table for all of us. We are free. We are free. We are free. May this change how we walk into rooms.

If you spend all your time trying to be happy, you end up focusing all your attention on yourself and how “happy” you are and, as a result, you become a shriveled self who can’t live for some larger cause. Your life will center on yourself and your moment-by-moment focus will be on how you feel inside. Your sole criterion of evaluation for seeking a job, making friends, finding a spouse (or staying with a spouse!), and selecting a church will reduce to one overarching concern: How does this particular thing make me feel? The best way to be happy in the contemporary sense is to forget about it, to try to live a good life for a bigger purpose, especially for the cause of Christ.

When one places life's center of gravity not in life but in the 'beyond' — in nothingness — one deprives life of its center of gravity altogether. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, everything natural in the instincts — whatever in the instincts is beneficent and life-promoting or guarantees a future now arouses mistrust. To live so that there is no longer any sense in living, that now becomes the 'sense' of life. Why communal sense, why any further gratitude for descent and ancestors, why cooperate or trust; why envisage and promote any common welfare? Just so many 'temptations,' just so many distractions from the 'right path' — for only 'one thing is needful.

The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creations. Not to make people with better morals, but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love. This, my friends, is what it really means to be a Christian.

Whereas Jesus demanded of the Jews the rejection of the tribalist Jahweh whom they identified with Israel, the race, the community the political state as object of worship and desire, the Sufis, born in an atmosphere of pure monotheism, demanded what Jesus of the first century A.D. would demand if he were to relive his early life again in present-day monotheistic Christendom. This does not mean that Jesus did not demand, like the Sufis, the cleansing of the soul from the personal deities it may worship besides God, but it does mean that the main weight of his teaching centered around the Jewish preoccupation with the tribe as God." "The object and deal of Sufism is, therefore, identically the same as that of the radical self-transformation of Jesus. Both aimed at the state of consciousness in which God is the sole subject, the sole determiner and the sole object of love and devotion. The tradition of both later influenced each other and succeeded in developing the same kind of preparatory disciplines leading towards the end. Finally, both referred to the final end of these processes as 'oneness' and their reference was in each case exposed to the same dangers of misunderstanding, indeed to the same misunderstanding. The oneness of Jesus was misunderstood as unity and fusion of being, and thus gave rise to the greatest materialization of an essentially spiritual union history has ever seen. The oneness of the highest Sufi state was likewise misunderstood and gave rise to the worst crime perpetrated on account of a supremely conscious misunderstanding...The destinies of the two misunderstandings, however, were far apart. The Christian misunderstanding came to dominate the Christendom; the Muslim misunderstanding performed its bloody deed and sank away in front of the Sufi tide which overwhelmed the Muslim world. The success of Sufism in Islam was therefore the success of the Jesus' ethic, but devoid of the theological superstructures which this Christian misunderstanding had constructed concerning the oneness of Christ with God, or of men with Christ. In the Middle Ages, the intellectual disciples of Jesus were the sufis of Islam, rather than the theologians of the Council or Pope-monarchs of Christendom.

Kami pushed us hard — and successfully. To put Christ in the box, I found, is actually a sign of contradiction, a paradox. To put Christ in the box is to break down the walls of the box and allow the power and grace of his life to invade every aspect of your own life. It follows the same wonderfully inverted logic as the ancient assertion that it is in giving that one receives, in our weakness we are made strong, and in dying we are born to richer life. I had chosen to make Christ my primary loyalty but not my exclusive loyalty. That was an important distinction, for I still had loyalties to Linda, to work, to friends, and to projects. Christ is the center of all that, but he would not stand in the way of those other things that give me balance and wholeness. For

And just as Christ is always drawing his people closer to himself, so in Christ-centered marriage each spouse is constantly endeavoring to provide an atmosphere in the home which helps the other to draw closer to Christ, to be always flourishing in the spiritual life. This certainly is another tremendously important reason for marriage. As the Monk Moses of Mt. Athos states, “Two people come to the communion of marriage to help one another in their salvation.” Fr. Alexander Elchaninov hints at this with these remarkable words: “In marriage the festive joy of the first day should last for the whole of life: every day should be a feast day; every day husband and wife should appear to each other as new, extraordinary beings. The only way of achieving this: let both deepen their spiritual life, and strive hard in the task of self-development.

The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creations. Not to make people with better morals, but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love. This, my friends, is what it really means to be a Christian. Our religion never begins with what we do for God. It always starts with what God has done for us, the great and wondrous things that God dreamed of and achieved for us in Christ Jesus.

Prayer and Meditation Matthew 14 AND HE WENT UP INTO THE MOUNTAIN APART TO PRAY This was always the practice of Jesus when he would move into the masses, the crowd, afterwards he would go alone into deep prayer and meditation. Why did he do this? If you have been meditating, you will understand. You will understand that once you start meditating, a very fragile and delicate quality of consciousness is born in you. A flower of the unknown, of the beyond, starts opening, which is delicate. And whenever you move into the crowd, you lose something. Whenever you come back from the crowd, you come back lesser than you had gone. Something has been lost, some contact has been lost. The crowd pulls you down, it has a gravitation of it's own. You may not feel it if you live on the same plane of consciousness. Then there is no problem, then you have nothing to lose. In fact, when you live in the crowd, on the same plane, alone you feel very uneasy. When you are with people, you feel good and happy. But alone, you feel sad, your aloneness is not aloneness. It is loneliness, you miss the other. You do not find yourself in the aloneness, you simply miss the other. When you are alone, you are not alone, beacuse you are not there. Only the desire to be with others is there - that is what loneliness is. Always remember the distinction between aloneness and loneliness. Aloneness is a peak experience - loneliness is a valley. Aloneness has light in it, loneliness is dark. Loneliness is when you desire others; aloneness is when you enjoy yourself. When Jesus would move into the masses, into the crowd, he would tell his disciples to got to the other shore of the lake, and he would move into total aloneness. Not even the disciples were allowed to be with him. This was a constant practice with him. Whenever you go into the crowd, you are infected by it. You need a higher altitude to purify yourself, you need to be alone so that you can become fresh again. You need to be alone with yourself, so that you become together again. You need to be alone, so that you become centered and rooted in yourself again. Whenever you move with others, they push you off centre. AND WHEN THE EVENING WAS COME, HE WAS THERE ALONE Nothing is said about his prayer in the Bible, just the word "prayer". Before God or before existence, you simply need to be vulnerable - that is prayer. You are no to say something. So when you go into prayer, don't start saying something. It will all be desires, demands and deep complaints to God. And prayer with complaints is no prayer, a prayer with deep gratitude is prayer. There is no need to say something, you can just be silent. Hence nothing is said about what Jesus did in his aloneness. It simply says "apart to pray". He went apart, he became alone. That is what prayer is, to be alone, where the other is not felt, where the other is not standing between you and existence. When God's breeze can pass througn you, unhindered. It is a cleansing experience. It revejunates your spirit. To be with God simply means to be alone. You can miss the point, if you start thinking about God, then you are not alone. If you start talking to God, then in imagination you have created the other. And then you God is a projection, it will be a projection of your father. A prayer is not to say something. It is to be silent, open, available. And there is no need to believe in God, because that too is a projection. The only need is to be alone, to be capable of being alone - and immediately you are with God. Whenever you are alone, you are with God.

Let this change you. Let this take hold in the very center of your soul. Write it on the walls of your heart. Let this emanate through every part of you, and trickle into every aspect of your life. You were not designed to be merely a good person, but that through the experience of mortality you could embrace the divinity you were created with. I do not merely want you to get along with others, but for everyone to be one, and one in me. Not for my glory, but that the glory of godliness will exalt you to a higher plane of existence, beyond anything you've ever imagined. Throw out weakness and fear; rid yourself of those spoiled garments. Adorn yourself with new garments, spotless and pure. Be reborn. Set your hand to the plow and look not back. Take that first step onto the water; do not fear the wind or the waves, for it is I your Lord and Savior who beckon you. Listen o listen to my voice, which is the voice of the Good Sheppard who calls you; for why should ye parish for naught?’ Parker, the bar has been set, for you and for I, and all the rest of humanity should we chose to accept the invitation,” Flavius concluded powerfully.

You either are a Christian or you are not — you either are united to him by faith or you are not — because being a Christian is, first of all, a “standing” with God. However, we also acknowledge that coming to this point of uniting to Christ by faith often works as a process, not only as an event. It can occur through a series of small decisions or thoughts that bring a person closer and closer to the point of saving faith. In a post-Christendom setting, more often than not, this is the case. People simply do not have the necessary background knowledge to hear a gospel address and immediately understand who God is, what sin is, who Jesus is, and what repentance and faith are in a way that enables them to make an intelligent commitment. They often have far too many objections and beliefs for the gospel to be readily plausible to them. Therefore, most people in the West need to be welcomed into community long enough for them to hear multiple expressions of the gospel — both formal and informal — from individuals and teachers. As this happens in community, nonbelievers come to understand the character of God, sin, and grace. Many of their objections are answered through this process. Because they are “on the inside” and involved in ongoing relationships with Christians, they can imagine themselves as Christians and see how the faith fleshes out in real life.

It was like a page out of the telephone book. Alphabetically, numerically, statistically, it made sense. But when you looked at it up close, when you examined the pages separately, or the parts separately, when you examined one lone individual and what constituted him, examined the air he breathed, the life he led, the chances he risked, you saw something so foul and degrading, so low, so miserable, so utterly hopeless and senseless, that it was worse than looking into a volcano. Outwardly it seems to be a beautiful honeycomb, with all the drones crawling over each other in a frenzy of work; inwardly it’s a slaughterhouse, each man killing off his neighbor and sucking the juice from his bones. Superficially it looks like a bold, masculine world; actually it’s a whorehouse run by women, with the native sons acting as pimps and the bloody foreigners selling their flesh... The whole continent is sound asleep and in that sleep a grand nightmare is taking place… At night the streets of New York reflect the crucifixion and death of Christ. When the snow is on the ground and there is the utmost silence there comes out of the hideous buildings of New York a music of such sullen despair and bankruptcy as to make the flesh shrivel. No stone was laid upon another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance or joy. One thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly, and the streets smell of empty bellies and full bellies and bellies half full. The streets smell of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they smell of the belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the empty belly which are null and void. Just as the city itself had become a huge tomb in which men struggled to earn a decent death so my own life came to resemble a tomb which I was constructing out of my own death. I was walking around in a stone forest the center of which was chaos; sometimes in the dead center, in the very heart of chaos, I danced or drank myself silly, or I made love, or I befriended some one, or I planned a new life, but it was all chaos, all stone, and all hopeless and bewildering. Until the time when I would encounter a force strong enough to whirl me out of this mad stone forest no life would be possible for me nor could one page be written which would have meaning… Everybody and everything is a part of life... As an individual, as flesh and blood, I am leveled down each day to make the fleshless, bloodless city whose perfection is the sum of all logic and death to the dream. I am struggling against an oceanic death in which my own death is but a drop of water evaporating. To raise my own individual life but a fraction of an inch above this sinking sea of death I must have a faith greater than Christ’s, a wisdom deeper than that of the greatest seer. I must have the ability and the patience to formulate what is not contained in the language of our time, for what is now intelligible is meaningless. My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known. My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity, never arrested, never looking back, never dwindling. The city grows like a cancer; I must grow like a sun. The city eats deeper and deeper into the red; it is an insatiable white louse which must die eventually of inanition. I am going to starve the white louse which is eating me up. I am going to die as a city in order to become again a man. Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth. Infinitely better, as life moves toward a deathly perfection, to be just a bit of breathing space, a stretch of green, a little fresh air, a pool of water. Better also to receive men silently and to enfold them, for there is no answer to make while they are still frantically rushing to turn the corner.

APRIL 7 Corporate worship is designed to confront you with a view of life that has at its center a dead man’s cross and a living man’s empty tomb. There are two themes that I have repeated in writing and speaking again and again. I will repeat them here: Human beings made in the image of God do not live life based on the facts of their experience, but based on their interpretation of the facts. Whether you know it or not, you have been designed by God to be a meaning maker. You are a rational human being (even if you don’t always show it), and you have a constant desire for life to make sense. So you are constantly thinking and constantly interpreting. You don’t actually respond to what is going on around you; you respond to the sense you have made of what is going on around you. This means that there is always some kind of interpretive grid that you are carrying around with you that helps you to make sense out of your life. Everybody believes something. Everybody assumes that certain things are true. Everybody brings some system of “wisdom” to their lives to help them to explain and understand. No one is more influential in your life than you are, because no one talks to you more than you do. We never stop talking to ourselves. We are in a constant conversation with ourselves about God, others, ourselves, meaning and purpose, identity, and such. The things you say to you about you, God, and life are profoundly important because they form and shape the way you then respond to the things that God has put on your plate. You see, you are always preaching to yourself some kind of worldview, some kind of “gospel,” if you will. The question is, in your private moment-by-moment conversation, what are you saying to you? Paul argues very powerfully that the “dead man’s cross, live man’s empty tomb” gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, which the world sees as utter foolishness, is in fact the wisest of wisdom. It is the only way to make sense out of life. It is the only lens through which you can see life accurately. It is the only kind of wisdom that really does give a final and reliable answer to the fundamental questions of life that every person asks. And at the center of this message of wisdom is not a set of ideas but a person who, in his life and death, offers you not only answers, but every grace you need to be what you were created to be and to do what you have been called to do.

MARCH 31 The cross is evidence that in the hands of the Redeemer, moments of apparent defeat become wonderful moments of grace and victory. At the center of a biblical worldview is this radical recognition—the most horrible thing that ever happened was the most wonderful thing that ever happened. Consider the cross of Jesus Christ. Could it be possible for something to happen that was more terrible than this? Could any injustice be greater? Could any loss be more painful? Could any suffering be worse? The only man who ever lived a life that was perfect in every way possible, who gave his life for the sake of many, and who willingly suffered from birth to death in loyalty to his calling was cruelly and publicly murdered in the most vicious of ways. How could it happen that the Son of Man could die? How could it be that men could capture and torture the Messiah? Was this not the end of everything good, true, and beautiful? If this could happen, is there any hope for the world? Well, the answer is yes. There is hope! The cross was not the end of the story! In God’s righteous and wise plan, this dark and disastrous moment was ordained to be the moment that would fix all the dark and disastrous things that sin had done to the world. This moment of death was at the same time a moment of life. This hopeless moment was the moment when eternal hope was given. This terrible moment of injustice was at the very same time a moment of amazing grace. This moment of extreme suffering guaranteed that suffering would end one day, once and for all. This moment of sadness welcomed us to eternal joy of heart and life. The capture and death of Christ purchased for us life and freedom. The very worst thing that could happen was at the very same time the very best thing that could happen. Only God is able to do such a thing. The same God who planned that the worst thing would be the best thing is your Father. He rules over every moment in your life, and in powerful grace he is able to do for you just what he did in redemptive history. He takes the disasters in your life and makes them tools of redemption. He takes your failure and employs it as a tool of grace. He uses the “death” of the fallen world to motivate you to reach out for life. The hardest things in your life become the sweetest tools of grace in his wise and loving hands. So be careful how you make sense of your life. What looks like a disaster may in fact be grace. What looks like the end may be the beginning. What looks hopeless may be God’s instrument to give you real and lasting hope. Your Father is committed to taking what seems so bad and turning it into something that is very, very good.

This is what sin does to us all. At a deep and often unnoticed level, sin replaces worship of God with worship of self. It replaces submission with self-rule. It replaces gratitude with demands for more. It replaces faith with self-reliance. It replaces vertical joy with horizontal envy. It replaces a rest in God’s sovereignty with a quest for personal control. We live for our glory. We set up our rules. We ask others to serve our agenda. We curse whatever gets in our way. We hate having to wait. We get upset when we have to go without. We strike back when we think we have been wronged. We do all we can to satisfy our cravings. We think too much about our own pleasure. We envy those who have what we think we deserve. We pout when we think we have been overlooked. We hate suffering of any kind. We manipulate others for our own good. We attempt to work ourselves into positions of power and control. We are obsessed about what is best for us. We demand more than we serve, and we take more than we give. We long to be first and hate being last. We are all too concerned with being right, being noticed, and being affirmed. We find it easier to judge those who have offended us than to forgive them. We require life to be predictable, satisfying, and easy. We do all these things because we are full of ourselves, in awe more of ourselves than of God. This is what Paul is talking about when he writes that Christ “died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves” (2 Cor. 5:15). Here we see the great replacement again. It is what sin does to us all; no longer living for God, we live for ourselves. The myriad of dysfunctions of the human community can be traced to this one thing: awe. When we replace vertical awe of God with awe of self, bad things happen in the horizontal community. You see it played out in a thousand ways every day. If you listen, you will discover that the universal language of sinners in this broken world is complaint. When you’re at the center, when you feel entitled, when your desires dominate your heart, and when it really is all about you, you will have much to complain about. It is amazing how much more natural complaint is for us than thanks or how much more we tend to grumble than we tend to praise. We talk much more about what we want than about what we have been given. Notice how much we compare what we have to what others have and how little of the time we are satisfied. Listen to people very long, and you’ll hear the drone of complaint far more frequently than you’ll hear the melody of thankfulness. You see, we don’t first have a grumbling problem. No, we have an awe problem that results in a life of personal dissatisfaction and complaint. When awe of self replaces awe of God, praise will be rare and grumbling plentiful.

When the center of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in "the beyond" in nothingness then one has taken away its center of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning: this is now the "meaning" of life. Why be public spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labor together, trust one another, or concern one's self about the common welfare, and try to serve it? Merely so many "temptations," so many strayings from the "straight path." " One thing only is necessary". That every man, because he has an "immortal soul," is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of things the "salvation" of every individual may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended in their behalf it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to insolence. And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery of personal vanity for its triumph it was thus that it lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and off scouring of humanity to its side. The "salvation of the soul" in plain English: "the world revolves around me." The poisonous doctrine, " equal rights for all," has been propagated as a Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to every step upward, to every development of civilization out of the ressentiment of the masses it has forged its chief weapons against us , against everything noble, joyous and high spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth. To allow "immortality" to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most vicious outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated. And let us not underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity has had, even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of honorable pride in himself and his equals for the pathos of distance. Our politics is sick with this lack of courage! The aristocratic attitude of mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief in the "privileges of the majority" makes and will continue to make revolutions it is Christianity, let us not doubt, and Christian valuations, which convert every revolution into a carnival of blood and crime! Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the "lowly" lowers.

So what brought you here?” Emilio asks. I don’t set the icing bag down, because it’s nice to have something to do with my hands, although they’re suddenly shaking. “I wanted to talk to you about Peck.” “What about her?” “I wanted to see if you’d have any objections to me asking her to marry me.” I hear a whoop from the other room. Emilio rolls his eyes. “Why do you want to marry her?” Why do I want to marry her? She’s just Peck. And I feel like she was made for me. “Um…” “The answer is no, if that’s the best you can do.” He points to the cupcakes. “Ice them,” he says. I ice quietly for a few minutes, trying to gather my thoughts. “Didn’t expect you to give up quite so easily,” he suddenly says. I look up. “Oh, I’m not giving up. I’m just thinking.” “You about done with that?” I shake my head. “Not yet.” “Keep icing.” Suddenly, Marta strolls into the room. There’s purpose in her stride and I back up against the wall, because I’m afraid I’m her target. But I quickly see I’m not. She goes for Emilio, but he must be used to this. He runs around the corner of the center island and she chases him. She picks up a rolling pin and runs, but he runs a little bit faster. Suddenly, she stops and blows a stray lock of hair from her eyes. “Stop tormenting the poor boy,” she says. She shakes the rolling pin at him. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he breathes. “I was having fun with it!” He grins. Then he sobers completely. “Did Peck tell you about the day we met?” “Yes, sir,” I tell him. “What she didn’t tell you was my side of it.” He rubs at the back of his hand. “I had been hanging out in the boys’ ward at the home, and one of the little assholes bit me on the back of the hand, so I was in a bad mood. I wanted nothing more than to get out of there. I walked around the corner, trying to find Marta, and I saw her sitting beside a little girl. I took one look at that kid and I said to myself, She’s my daughter.” He takes a deep breath. “I know it sounds stupid, and I suppose it should. But she was sitting there on the edge of the bed and she wouldn’t speak. But when she looked at me, she said a million words with her eyes.” Marta wipes a tear from her cheek. “I have loved that little girl from the minute I met her. I never doubted that she belonged to us, and neither did she.” He waits a beat. “The first time she spoke to me was when she had a set of drumsticks in her hand.” He looks at me. “Do you know what she said?” I shake my head, and swallow past the lump in my throat. “She took my hand and said, ‘I’m glad you’re my dad.’ It was one big stutter, and I loved every syllable. She makes me so fucking proud.” He points a finger at me. “She’s fucking perfect, so if you so much as make her cry, I will find you and jam her drumsticks so far up your ass that you’ll taste them ten years from now. Do you understand?” “Yes, sir.” I swallow again. “So, yes, you can marry my daughter. And you better make her happy every day for the rest of her life, because I will be watching. Understand?” “Yes, sir.” He points to the cupcakes. “Keep icing.” “Yes, sir.” I grin. Marta lays a hand on my shoulder. “Did you get a ring yet?” “No, ma’am. I wanted to get permission first.” She looks at Emilio and quirks a brow. He nods. She disappears into a bedroom and comes back a minute later with a box. “It was my mother’s,” Emilio says. “Peck used to try it on all the time when she was small, and she loves it. So you can use it if you want to.” He’s grumbling, but I can tell he’s serious. I pop open the box and stare down at a beautiful antique ring. “It’s lovely. Are you sure it’s okay if I use it?” He nods. He points to the cupcakes. “Keep icing.” “Yes, sir.” I smile.

The splendors of creation and the agonies of redemption combine in this event, this center where God in Christ invades existence with redeeming life and decisively defeats evil.

You will not pursue Christ-centered conflict resolution if your heart is not captivated by Christ. If Christ doesn’t reign supreme in your life, then your peacemaking efforts will fall short.

What does it mean to live in an intentionally Christ-centered way in your daily life—in your marriage, parenting, friendship, work, community, finances, etc.? Remember that only when you live for Christ can you recapture the transcendence for which you were created. Only in transcendent living can you recover your true humanity. And only in recovering your true humanity can your life really have meaning and purpose. All of this is true because your humanity is not tied to self-discovery and self-fulfillment (as the surrounding world proposes) but in investing your life for Christ’s glory and the success of his kingdom on earth.

stage, commanding the attention and credit we think we deserve. But one of the most important things God’s word does is to confront us with another story. In this story we are not at center stage. In this story we were given life and breath to serve the purposes of another, and for the sake of the glory of another. The biblical story starts with God at the center. It chronicles the great glory war, with the great captain, Christ, gaining victory through his death. The war begins in Genesis 3 and will continue until the war is finally won and everything that exists serves God’s glory in the new heavens and new earth. This story reminds us again and again that self-glory is the ultimate human dysfunction and is always self-destructive. It teaches us that self-worship is bondage and true freedom is found only when you surrender your heart to the worship of God. The Bible reminds us that coming to Christ in repentance and faith is not

God-given prayer and praise have as their essence a waiting on God, a willingness to be wrought upon by the hammer and the fire of the Almighty, until the chains of self-centered desires fall away from the personality, and the love of Christ becomes the deepest hunger of the inner life.

Trying harder doesn’t do it. Enter the Spirit. God provides his Spirit to live the life of God in us, and we are reoriented around the center that holds. When we leave church, dismissed by the benediction, we are far less likely to be intimidated by the “rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

This biblical warrant for “capital punishment” is also the grounds for its abolition in Christ. It naturally follows for Yoder that those whose faith centers on the conviction that Christ shed his own blood in the place of all capital offenders (“for the wages of sin is death,” Rom 6:23) must actively oppose the practice of capital punishment. In Yoder’s words, “Life is God’s peculiar possession, which man may not profane with impunity. Thus, the function of capital punishment in Genesis 9 is not the defense of society but the expiation of an offense against the image of God. If this be the case—and both exegetical and anthropological studies confirm strongly that it is—then the central events of the New Testament, the cross and the resurrection, are overwhelmingly relevant to this issue. The sacrifice of Christ is the end of all expiatory killing.”20

The natural man is self-centered, selfishness promotes self, protects self and provides for self. Your recognition of God will not go unchallenged by the natural man. The natural man fights for recognition and you should give what it fights for. However, the only recognition you should give to the natural man is its worthlessness in comparison to the NEW MAN in CHRIST JESUS!

Love is a useful measure for distinguishing guilt from responsibility. Guilt is about me. It centers me on myself and weakens my power to care for myself and for other people. But responsibility faces the opposite direction. Responsibility is an act of love. It recognizes wrongdoing and repents of it. But rather than acting penitent out of fear or shame, it lets those self-centered feelings be crucified with Christ. Then, alive in Christ rather than in myself, I become capable of responding—even to my own weakness—with love.

Carl Sagan collected snippets of human experience on a golden record to communicate what life was all about. For him, life on earth was centered on us. Aldrin chose to celebrate the greatest dash ever lived, that of Jesus Christ. He wanted the world to know that in the midst of the pain and heartache, regret and trauma, frustration and anger, a Savior had intervened in the human story.

In carrying out his mandate, it is evident that, in addition to being a man of prayer, Dr. King was a contemplative, Dr. Ruth Haley Barton, founder of the Transforming Center, affirmed the inclusion of contemplation and prayerfulness in his life when, in honor of Martin Luther King Day in January 2010, she wrote that Dr. King’s “life was characterized by a powerful integration of prayer and contemplation with a profound commitment to decisive and loving action in the world.’ Barton’s insight is extremely valuable in the discussion of the power of prayer and spiritual direction from an African American perspective. In identifying Dr. King as a man of contemplative action, she included a clear definition of that term: ‘Contemplative action is action that emerges from our real encounters with God. It is doing what God calls us to do when he calls us to do it - no matter how afraid we are or how ill-equipped we feel. Contemplative action is the willingness to go beyond being primarily concerned for our own safety and survival to the place where we know that our real life is hidden with Christ in God no matter what happens to our physical life. Contemplative action is doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right Spirit, completely given over to a Power that is beyond our own - even, and perhaps most especially, when the risks are very great. This kind of action is impossible without being radically in touch with the Source of our life through prayer and contemplation.

Contentment in Christian perspective must never be confused with mere stoicism, proud self-denial, determined self-sufficiency, or condescending aloofness. Rather, it is the product of knowing Christ so well, and trusting him so fully, that the vicissitudes of life, no matter how dire, cannot hold a candle to the joy of steadfastly trusting our heavenly Father. This is a book to savor and reread, and then pass on to others.

Are there areas of your life and leadership in which you act as if God’s plan depends on your competence? Meditate on God’s message to Moses. Ask God to reveal and to remove the pride that presumes his plan depends on you.

The invisible is more substantial than the visible; The future shapes the past; The new is more fundamental than the old.

The victorious Christian neither exalts nor downgrades himself. His interests have shifted from self to Christ. What he is or is not no longer concerns him. He believes that he has been crucified with Christ and he is not willing either to praise or deprecate such a man. Yet the knowledge that he has been crucified is only half the victory. “Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). Christ is now where the man’s ego was formerly. The man is now Christ-centered instead of self-centered, and he forgets himself in his delighted preoccupation with Christ.

Revival occurs as a group of people who, on the whole, think they already know the gospel discover they do not really or fully know it, and by embracing the gospel they cross over into living faith. When this happens in any extensive way, an enormous release of energy occurs. The church stops basing its justification on its sanctification. The nonchurched see this and are attracted by the transformed life of the Christian community as it grows into its calling to be a sign of the kingdom, a beautiful alternative to a human society without Christ.

God has a purpose for you. It is that you would live as one of his representatives; that is, that you would live representatively. And what are you representing? You are called to represent your Savior King. And what does that practically look like? Representing the King means you represent his message, his methods, and his character. Representing the King’s message means that you look at every situation and relationship in life through the lens of the truth of Scripture—the center of which is the gospel of Jesus Christ—and determine to help others look at life that way too.

The Catholic Faith is not man-centered but Christ-centered and has always been so. It is for man but always points to God, not to man. This mindset greatly aids one, especially in one’s spiritual life, even concerning that of modesty.

Enter by the narrow gate, since the road that leads to perdition is wide and spacious, and many take it; but it is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

takes the eyes of the heart, however, a long time to adjust to the Light. By having a loving faith, watching at all times and praying, doing good to all, and practicing the Beatitudes, we actually follow the Lord Jesus to new Life. We follow him from this world to the Father’s House in the heavenly places, we follow him in the Church, and we follow him under the influence of the Spirit living and working in our hearts. The Spirit is the one who changes us, carves us into another Christ, every step of the way. The center of our lives on earth is the Eucharist, and our hope is to grow in contemplative prayer—for the eyes of our hearts to be opened to the revelation of the

ALTARed Life Apparel puts Christ back at the center of Christian t-shirts. More than sinners saved by grace, we are an ALTARed Generation declaring, "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." The ALTARed Life is lived by faith in Jesus. At the altar of His cross we lay down our lives in exchange for His righteousness. Crucified with Christ, we clothe ourselves in Him and share the Word of our testimony. Our promise is to provide Christian clothing centered in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

no man can possibly live such a God-centered life until he is converted unto Christ. In order to know how we can glorify God and enjoy him forever, we must learn the way of salvation taught in the Bible. We must learn "what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man.

He endured all that hell is on the cross, so that you would never know what hell is like.

When your heart is gripped by the love of God poured out in the cross, and when you see the extent of that love in the propitiation by which Christ became the sacrifice for your sin, bearing wrath and entering hell for you, and when you are convinced that this Christ offers Himself in redeeming love to others who do not yet know Him, a passion will be lit in your heart to pursue a God-centered life.

I am so glad that Jesus does not say, “Practice more spiritual disciplines.” He says, “Come to me…and I will give you rest.

God does not consume us in his wrath, but instead he consumes his wrath on himself by becoming our substitute, paying for our sins and giving us the gift of salvation.

When you feed hungry people, you are showing mercy. The search for justice begins when you ask why the hungry are hungry.

Such experiences can make us bewail how the Western world gives itself over annually to its Claus-mass or commerce-mass. We celebrate a reworked pagan Saturnalia of epic proportions, one in which the only connection with the incarnation is semantic. Santa is worshiped, not the Savior; pilgrims go to the stores with credit cards, not to the manger with gifts. It is the feast of indulgence, not of the incarnation.

Nothing but the gospel can free us for being thoroughly known without fear. Jesus, your love is unlike anything else we can experience in this life. In fact, your love is better than life itself. We adore and praise you this day as the Christ—the Messiah, our Lenten Lord, the heart knower, our holy lover, our righteousness from God, our only hope of glory!

This poem, “Stations on the Road to Freedom,” echoes the Christ-centered or christotelic emphasis we have come to see in so much of Bonhoeffer’s writings. In Christ’s humiliation we see discipline, action, suffering, and ultimately death. In Christ’s crucifixion we see all four as well. And in Christ’s resurrection we see his triumph over death and over suffering. In the risen and living Christ we see the triumph of freedom.

Small groups are the place to push past Bible knowledge and on to life application so that we can see people's lives transform more and more into the image of Christ.

We know our skills are insufficient for an activity with such vast consequences. We recognize that our hearts are too lacking in purity to lead others to holiness. Honest evaluation inevitably causes us to conclude that we do not have sufficient eloquence, wisdom, or character to be capable of turning others from spiritual death to eternal life.

Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life. —PHILIPPIANS 4:7 MSG

The gospel-centered life is one that is driven by the knowledge that God has redeemed me, a sinner, through the vicarious death and victorious resurrection of Jesus Christ.

He may be doing it for you in this Advent season—graciously and tenderly frustrating you with life that is not centered on Christ and filling you with longings and desires that can’t find their satisfaction in what this world offers, but only in the God-man. What a Christmas gift that might be! Let all your frustrations with this world throw you onto the Word of God. It will become sweet—like walking into paradise.

Only God-the One through whom "all things were made" (1:3, cf. v. 10), in whom "was life" and "light" (v. 4)-can reverse creation's death and dissipate the darkness caused by sin. 2. But since that death and darkness are within creation, within man, the Word must become flesh in order to restore it from within. The Creator must enter His own creation, groaning as it is under the burden of alienation from Him.

One day Christ will return in the full glory of His resurrection power. The light will be switched on permanently. The Lamb of God who took away the sin of the world will be present in the new heavens and earth as their lamp. Neither sun nor moon will be needed (Rev. 21:23). As He will be the Life, so He will be the Light of the new world. "Jesus said to her, `I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live.... Do you believe this?"' (John 11:25-26). Well, do you?

Father, there’s no safer place to be—in life or in death—than in Christ. Because you’ve hidden our lives in Jesus, not a hair can fall from our heads, not a breath can be taken from our lungs, and not a beat can be missed by our hearts apart from your sovereign purposes and pleasure. And should I die in the next hour, my heart will forever proclaim, “My God has done all things well.” I pray with great gratitude, in Jesus’ most worthy name. Amen.

The marquee scrolling across our minds trying to reinterpret life reads: "God-Against-Us." This becomes the dominant lens through which our flesh interprets life. We no longer give our loving Father the benefit of the doubt. Instead, we view every event as conclusive proof that God is against us.

Our Father doesn't want us to move on, "maturing" past his Son. In point of fact, our Father is intent that we recognize that he has ordered his universe so that it revolves around his beloved One-not around ourselves, our desires, or even our good works done in his name. So, let me ask you: Is he the supremely honored center of your being? Is he the incomparable, unparalleled, unrivaled sun around whom your life orbits?

Biblical preaching moves from exegetical commentary and doctrinal exposition to life instruction. Such preaching exhorts as well as expounds because it recognizes that Scripture’s own goal is not merely to share information about God but to conform his people to the likeness of Jesus Christ. Preaching without application may serve the mind, but preaching with application results in service to Christ. Application makes Jesus the source and the objective of a sermon’s exhortation as well as the focus of its explanation.

Don’t continue to straddle the fence. Commit your total effort and energy to Christ. The wholeheartedly committed Christian is the truly happy Christian. In Philippians 1:21 we read: “To me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” When we lose sight of who God is and forget to give Him honor, anxiety sets into our lives and day-to-day living doesn’t make sense. When we make our goal the pursuit of things and we take our eyes off Jesus, we invariably will be disappointed in our journeys. God does not fail us. He gives us moderation and balance and direction and purpose. A full life. As I’ve mentioned, one of our family’s favorite verses is Matthew 6:33: “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.” Yes, this is the ultimate anxiety breaker—seek first His kingdom. Bob and I use this as our test for doing anything in life. When we face a decision, we ask ourselves if we are truly seeking His kingdom first, or are we seeking to build our vision of success and value? In John 16:33 we read: “These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world” (NASB). God has promised us peace, but many of us choose anxiety instead. We will never be the women God wants us to be until we heed His call—“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Prayer: Father God, take my eyes off the things of the world. I realize that life is more than things. I know that they don’t give my life purpose and meaning. I want to focus on serving You all of my existing days. Give me the power and conviction to follow Your ways. Amen.   Action: Analyze what is making you anxious. What are you going to do about it? Physically write out on a piece of paper what these anxieties are and what you will do to change each into peace. Today’s Wisdom: Anxiety is the natural result when our hopes are centered in anything short of God and His will for us. —BILLY GRAHAM

For the Church, the option for the poor is primarily a theological category rather than a cultural, sociological, political, or philosophical one. God shows the poor "his first mercy." This divine preference has consequences for the faith life of all Christians, because we are called to have "this mind...which was in Jesus Christ" (Phil. 2:5). Inspired by this, the Church has made an option for the poor, which is understood as a "special form of primacy in the exercise of Christian charity, to which the whole tradition of the Church bears witness." This option - as Benedict XVI has taught - "is implicit in our Christian faith in a God who became poor for us, so as to enrich us with his poverty." This is why I want a Church that is poor and for the poor. They have much to teach us. Not only do they share in the sensus fidei, but in their difficulties they know the suffering Christ. We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them. The new evangelization is an invitation to acknowledge the saving power at work in their lives and to put them at the center of the Church's pilgrim way. We are called to find Christ in them, to lend our voice to their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to speak for them, and to embrace the mysterious wisdom that God wishes to share with us through them.

We ignore the Holy Spirit when we position ourselves at the center of life. - From the Book: Removing Your Shame Label.

He may be frustrating you with life that is not centered on Christ and filling you with longings and desires that can’t find their satisfaction in what this world offers, but only in the God-man.

Joseph Ruggles Wilson reminds us how unique is each preacher’s challenge: In other words, preaching is not an imitative exercise. Every preacher is to regard himself as an original exhibitor and enforcer of the terms of human salvation; a channel of gracious speech, markedly different from every other.    . . . Turn it which way we will, the conclusion is always before us, the preacher’s preaching is just another form of himself; i.e., if he does his own thinking; exhibits no emotions that he does not actually feel; and presents divine truth, not as a bundle of opinions which orthodoxy has agreed upon, but as so much vital blood that has been made to course in his veins, and therefore takes the form of his own Christian life. It is these live men whom God supremely calls; men who have eaten the word, as a prophet did, and into whom it has passed to become a perpetual throb in their hearts; so that when it comes forth again, it will proceed upon its errand, bearing the warmth of their innermost experiences; those experiences wherein are traced the musings which continued until they could find vent only in fire; the fire that burns quickly into other souls, melts where it burns, and remoulds where it melts.25

To be evangelical, then, means having one’s life centered on the terrifically good message that God is reconciling the world to himself in Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 5:17–19).

Our own relationship with Christ teaches us that we must treat people with compassion as well as confront them with the authority of the Word. As we need a stern hand in some moments and a loving embrace at others, so too do the people we face from the pulpit. The soul made sensitive by the recognition of its own sin, the awareness of God’s sovereignty, and the miracle of the Savior’s love is the one best suited to guide the tongue in the sanctuary as well as in the circumstances of life. Consistently aggressive or combative preachers ill disguise the spiritually resistant recesses of their own hearts.

The call of community isn't about finding people just like us, or at the exclusion of any people. Community in the biblical sense is clearly about unlike people finding Christ at the center of their inclusive life together. Thus, issues of community reflect powerful dynamics of how God brings very diverse people together for his glory and his witness in the world.

Without an ultimate authority for truth, all human striving has no ultimate value, and life itself becomes futile. Modern trends in preaching that deny the authority of the Word6 in the name of intellectual sophistication lead to a despairing subjectivism in which people do what is right in their own eyes—a state whose futility Scripture has clearly articulated (Judg. 21:25). The

for Christians, not every passage in the Bible is equally prescriptive or determinative for a Christian ethical life. Rather, the Old Testament must be read in light of the New, the Mosaic legislation must be read in light of its fulfillment in Christ (Rom 10:4), and so on. The point is simply that one must look for Scripture’s Christological center and read all of its various parts in light of that center. When

It means “human life and society as far as alienated from God, through being centered on material aims and objects, and thus opposed to God’s Spirit and kingdom.” Christ said: “If the world hate you, ye know that it hated Me before it hated you . . . the world hath hated them because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” Love of the world means the forgetfulness of the eternal future by reason of love for passing things.

When you committed your life to Christ, he moved into the center; but you must keep him there through worship.

Jesus did not come to add to our comforts. He did not come to help those who were already helping themselves or to fill life with more pleasant experiences. He came on a deliverance mission, to save sinners, and to do so He had to destroy the works of the Devil (Matt. 1:21; 1 John 3:8b).

In the Benedict Option, we are not trying to repeal seven hundred years of history, as if that were possible. Nor are we trying to save the West. We are only trying to build a Christian way of life that stands as an island of sanctity and stability amid the high tide of liquid modernity. We are not looking to create heaven on earth; we are simply looking for a way to be strong in faith through a time of great testing. The Rule, with its vision of an ordered life centered around Christ and the practices it prescribes to deepen our conversion, can help us achieve that goal.

The Gospel presents us with the righteousness of Jesus Christ, who, in his earthly life, perfectly interpreted the word of his Father. In so doing he justified the fallible attempts of his people to interpret the word. The justification of our hermeneutics by the perfect hermeneutics of Christ is the motivation for us to strive for hermeneutical sanctification.

The cross is the center and mother lode of all joy and satisfaction, because it is there that your old self has already died with Christ. Everything that hindered you from God was eradicated on the cross. Death to your old crooked self was a past-tense occurrence that already took place on His cross. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me (Gal. 2:20, NIV).

There had been occasions when David could have seized position and power by means that would have compromised his commitment to the Lord.

But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life. (Titus 3:4–7 NIV)

For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. If, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. (Rom. 5:15–17)

True Christian liberty, unlike the various "freedom" or "liberation" movements of the secular world, is not a matter of demanding the "rights" we have.

The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, “I was wrong.” – Sydney J. Harris

Faith and repentance are not static, the decision of a moment; they are the lifelong realities of a new heart (8:10; 10:16).

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones taught that the gospel emphasis on grace could be lost in several ways. A church might simply become heterodox — losing its grip on the orthodox tenets of theology that under-gird the gospel, such as the triune nature of God, the deity of Christ, the wrath of God, and so on. It may turn its back on the very belief in justification by faith alone and the need for conversion and so move toward a view that being a Christian is simply a matter of church membership or of living a life based on Christ’s example. This cuts the nerve of gospel renewal and revival.2 But it is possible to subscribe to every orthodox doctrine and nevertheless fail to communicate the gospel to people’s hearts in a way that brings about repentance, joy, and spiritual growth. One way this happens is through dead orthodoxy, in which such pride grows in our doctrinal correctness that sound teaching and right church practice become a kind of works-righteousness. Carefulness in doctrine and life is, of course, critical, but when it is accompanied in a church by self-righteousness, mockery, disdain of everyone else, and a contentious, combative attitude, it shows that, while the doctrine of justification may be believed, a strong spirit of legalism reigns nonetheless. The doctrine has failed to touch hearts.3 Lloyd-Jones also speaks of “defective orthodoxy” and “spiritual inertia.”4 Some churches hold to orthodox doctrines but with imbalances and a lack of proper emphasis. Many ministries spend more time defending the faith than propagating it. Or they may give an inordinate amount of energy and attention to matters such as prophecy or spiritual gifts or creation and evolution. A church may become enamored with the mechanics of ministry and church organization. There are innumerable reasons that critical doctrines of grace and justification and conversion, though strongly held, are kept “on the shelf.” They are not preached and communicated in such a way that connects to people’s lives. People see the doctrines — yet they do not see them.

GOSPEL REDISCOVERY Along with extraordinary, persistent prayer, the most necessary element of gospel renewal is a recovery of the gospel itself, with a particular emphasis on the new birth and on salvation through grace alone. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones taught that the gospel emphasis on grace could be lost in several ways. A church might simply become heterodox — losing its grip on the orthodox tenets of theology that under-gird the gospel, such as the triune nature of God, the deity of Christ, the wrath of God, and so on. It may turn its back on the very belief in justification by faith alone and the need for conversion and so move toward a view that being a Christian is simply a matter of church membership or of living a life based on Christ’s example. This cuts the nerve of gospel renewal and revival.2 But it is possible to subscribe to every orthodox doctrine and nevertheless fail to communicate the gospel to people’s hearts in a way that brings about repentance, joy, and spiritual growth. One way this happens is through dead orthodoxy, in which such pride grows in our doctrinal correctness that sound teaching and right church practice become a kind of works-righteousness. Carefulness in doctrine and life is, of course, critical, but when it is accompanied in a church by self-righteousness, mockery, disdain of everyone else, and a contentious, combative attitude, it shows that, while the doctrine of justification may be believed, a strong spirit of legalism reigns nonetheless. The doctrine has failed to touch hearts.3 Lloyd-Jones also speaks of “defective orthodoxy” and “spiritual inertia.”4 Some churches hold to orthodox doctrines but with imbalances and a lack of proper emphasis. Many ministries spend more time defending the faith than propagating it. Or they may give an inordinate amount of energy and attention to matters such as prophecy or spiritual gifts or creation and evolution. A church may become enamored with the mechanics of ministry and church organization. There are innumerable reasons that critical doctrines of grace and justification and conversion, though strongly held, are kept “on the shelf.” They are not preached and communicated in such a way that connects to people’s lives. People see the doctrines — yet they do not see them. It is possible to get an “A” grade on a doctrinal test and describe accurately the doctrines of our salvation, yet be blind to their true implications and power. In this sense, there are plenty of orthodox churches in which the gospel must be rediscovered and then brought home and applied to people’s hearts. When this happens, nominal Christians get converted, lethargic and weak Christians become empowered, and nonbelievers are attracted to the newly beautified Christian congregation.

Race and culture. The moralist/conservative bias is to use truth to evaluate cultures. Feeling superior to others in the impulse of self-justifying pride, moralists idolize their culture as supreme. The relativist/liberal approach is to relativize all cultures (“We can all get along because there is no truth”). The gospel leads us, on the one hand, to be somewhat critical of all cultures, including our own (since truth is objective and real). On the other hand, it leads us to recognize we are morally superior to no one, since we are saved by grace alone. In this instance, the gospel is the grand leveler. Both sin and grace strip everyone of every boast. “All have sinned” (Rom 3:23, emphasis added); “there is no one righteous, not even one” (Rom 3:10, emphasis added; cf. Ps 143:2); therefore, “whoever believes in [Jesus] shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16, emphasis added; cf. Mark 16:16; John 3:36; 5:24; 7:38; 11:26). For in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” (Gal 3:28, emphasis added). Christianity is universal in that it welcomes everybody, but it is also particular in its confession that Jesus is Lord, and culture and ethnicity (or whatever other identity) are not. Gospel-relying Christians will exhibit both moral conviction and compassion with flexibility.

And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. (John 17:3)

What if many listeners hold a profoundly different understanding of the concepts of God, truth, right and wrong, freedom, virtue, and sin? What if their approaches to reality, human nature and destiny, and human community are wholly different from our own? For decades, this has been the situation facing Christian churches in many areas around the world — places such as India, Iran, and Japan. Evangelism in these environments involves a lengthy process in which nonbelievers have to be invited into a Christian community that bridges the gap between Christian truth and the culture around it. Every part of a church’s life — its worship, community, public discourse, preaching, and education — has to assume the presence of nonbelievers from the surrounding culture. The aesthetics of its worship have to reflect the sensibilities of the culture and yet show how Christian belief shapes and is expressed through them. Its preaching and teaching have to show how the hopes of this culture’s people can find fulfillment only in Christ. Most of all, such a congregation’s believers have to reflect the demographic makeup of the surrounding community, thereby giving non-Christian neighbors attractive and challenging glimpses of what they would look like as Christians.

battlefield. Christ fought against the powers of sin and death for us. He defeated the powers of evil for us. 2. The language of the marketplace. Christ paid the ransom price, the purchase price, to buy us out of our indebtedness. He frees us from enslavement. 3. The language of exile. Christ was exiled and cast out of the community so we who deserve to be banished could be brought in. He brings us home. 4. The language of the temple. Christ is the sacrifice that purifies us and makes us acceptable to draw near to the holy God. He makes us clean and beautiful. 5. The language of the law court. Christ stands before the judge and takes the punishment we deserve. He removes our guilt and makes us righteous. It is sometimes implied we can choose which of these models we prefer and ignore the others, but this is misleading. Each way of communicating the atonement reflects a piece of inspired Scripture, and each tells us great things about our salvation that the others do not bring out as clearly. Each will have special resonance with certain temperaments and cultures. People who are fighting oppression or even enslavement and long for freedom will be helped by the first two grammars (the battlefield and the marketplace). People seeking relief for guilt and a sense of shame will be especially moved by the last two — the temple and the law court. People who feel alienated, rootless, and rejected will find the exile grammar intensely engaging. But perhaps the single most consoling and appealing theme is what theologian Roger Nicole has called the one, irreducible theme that runs through every single one of these models — the idea of substitution.28 Dr. Nicole taught that, regardless of the grammar being used, the essence of the atonement is always Jesus acting as our substitute. Jesus fights the powers, pays the price, bears the exile, makes the sacrifice, and bears the punishment for us, in our place, on our behalf. In every grammar, Jesus does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. He accomplishes salvation; we do nothing at all. And therefore the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus is at the heart of everything. This act — giving one’s life

The Bible isn’t an assistant to your old way of life. It’s the doorway to your new life in Christ.

the second week, and so on… She wasn’t a happy runner. In fact, she hated the idea at first. But during that first week I told her that I was

Jesus said, “These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11).The center of joy for the Christian is Christ. The joy is Christ’s joy. It is simply the life of the Lord Jesus Christ being lived out in an individual. Christian joy is letting Christ live His life out through you so that what He is, you become. There are other kinds of joy found in other places in the world, but there is no place where you can find Christian joy except in Christ.

The gospel isn't the dessert at the end of the meal. It's the salt that give distinctive flavor to the meat and potatoes. The gospel is what makes our teaching distinctively Christian. And Jesus is at the heat of the gospel. If we don't get back to Him, we miss out on the power of the Christian life.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; – Matthew 5:44

When I conform my will, my desires, and my passions for the good of my family I conform myself to the will of God.

They have been fulfilled in Christ, so we must determine their theological purposes and apply them to current situations. We need holiness and a proper relationship with God just as they did, and the legal regulations properly understood can help us center on those critical areas of the Christian life.

The flesh is that voice in your head that tells you, “If it feels good do it.” It tells us that we need things when we don’t, and if we followed it we’d sleep too late, eat too much, and eventually come to poverty. That’s where the heart wants to lead us.

Failure to deal with the presence of sin can often be traced back to spiritual amnesia-forgetting our new, true, real identity. As a believer, I am someone who has been delivered from the dominion of sin and who therefore is free and motivated to fight against the remnants of sin in my heart. You must know, rest in, think through, and act upon your new identity-you are in Christ.

Life is all the more wonderful when you have Christ as the center of your life.

Lewis wrote, “Don’t shine so others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see Him.

We may be grown-up biologically, but in terms of a spiritual journey, we are children. When you were a child, you probably felt much more grown up with each year that passed. But with hindsight, it is easy to see that at each age we were still immature in ways that we did not suspect. The same thing with our spiritual maturity: it is a lifetime-project!

An inability to encourage someone else is usually rooted in an absorption with self that is blind to the needs or gifts of others, or a pride that cannot bring itself to praise God's grace in them.

The God who is Lord of the universe, the personal God who created and sustains our world so that it does not fall back into nothingness, the God who saves us through the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, seeks to be the center of each and every human life.

June 21 THE MINISTRY OF THE INNER LIFE “You are . . . a royal priesthood . . . .” 1 Peter 2:9     By what right have we become “a royal priesthood”? It is by the right of the atonement by the Cross of Christ that this has been accomplished. Are we prepared to purposely disregard ourselves and to launch out into the priestly work of prayer? The continual inner-searching we do in an effort to see if we are what we ought to be generates a self-centered, sickly type of Christianity, not the vigorous and simple life of a child of God. Until we get into this right and proper relationship with God, it is simply a case of our “hanging on by the skin of our teeth,” although we say, “What a wonderful victory I have!” Yet there is nothing at all in that which indicates the miracle of redemption. Launch out in reckless, unrestrained belief that the redemption is complete. Then don’t worry anymore about yourself, but begin to do as Jesus Christ has said, in essence, “Pray for the friend who comes to you at midnight, pray for the saints of God, and pray for all men.” Pray with the realization that you are perfect only in Christ Jesus, not on the basis of this argument: “Oh, Lord, I have done my best; please hear me now.”     How long is it going to take God to free us from the unhealthy habit of thinking only about ourselves? We must get to the point of being sick to death of ourselves, until there is no longer any surprise at anything God might tell us about ourselves. We cannot reach and understand the depths of our own meagerness. There is only one place where we are right with God, and that is in Christ Jesus. Once we are there, we have to pour out our lives for all we are worth in this ministry of the inner life.

A Prayer about Normal Trials Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, as was necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. (1 Pet. 1:3–7) Heavenly Father, today I need a fresh supply of persevering grace, for the “all kinds of trials” of life are sapping my spirit and weighing me down. I need to be reassured that you are refining my faith and not just ignoring me. I feel tired, weary, disillusioned, and a simmering anger is emerging in my spirit. A part of me just says, “Buck up, you woozy whiner!” But I think the gospel offers a better way. Honestly, I’m embarrassed to even speak of my trials, because I didn’t go to sleep hungry or thirsty last night, I didn’t hear gunfire echoing through my neighborhood, there’s no plague pillaging my community, I don’t live with the fear of my children being sold into slavery, and my government isn’t threatening the exercise of my faith. These are realities with which many of my brothers and sisters in Christ live on a daily basis. For me, it’s more like swimming in a pool of tiny piranha just nibbling away at my joy, energy, and peace. Please give me grace perfectly suited for the demands and the dailiness of normal life—in this body with aging joints and a leaking memory; among fellow sinner-saints who, like me, love inconsistently; in unresolved stories from the past and present of brokenness and weakness; in the face of minor injustices and a lack of common mercies; when cars, plumbing, air conditioners, and other stuff just break; when people don’t say “thank you,” people drive like maniacs, and pets pee on the carpet. Lord, in all these things, I want your hand and heart to be at work. I want to know what a man of faith looks like, not just when I am praying for daily bread or facing a firing squad but when I’m living out the implications of the gospel in the daily messiness of normal life. I pray in Jesus’ tender name. Amen.

What is this brightness – with which God fills the soul of the just – but that clear knowledge of all that is necessary for salvation? He shows them the beauty of virtue and the deformity of vice. He reveals to them the vanity of this world, the treasures of grace, the greatness of eternal glory, and the sweetness of the consolations of the Holy Spirit. He teaches them to apprehend the goodness of God, the malice of the evil one, the shortness of life, and the fatal error of those whose hopes are centered in this world alone. Hence the equanimity of the just. They are neither puffed up by prosperity nor cast down by adversity. "A holy man," says Solomon, "continueth in wisdom as the sun, but a fool is changed as the moon." (Ecclus. 27:12). Unmoved by the winds of false doctrine, the just man continues steadfast in Christ, immovable in charity, unswerving in faith.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “Don’t shine so others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see Him.

Luther’s teaching is this: Anything we look to more than we look to Christ for our sense of acceptability, joy, significance, hope, and security is by definition our god — something we adore, serve, and rely on with our whole life and heart. In general, idols can be good things (family, achievement, work and career, romance, talent, etc. — even gospel ministry) that we turn into ultimate things to give us the significance and joy we need. Then they drive us into the ground because we must have them. A sure sign of the presence of idolatry is inordinate anxiety, anger, or discouragement when our idols are thwarted. So if we lose a good thing, it makes us sad, but if we lose an idol, it devastates us.

If we hope to live in victory, we must keep our eyes off of the world and on the One who perfects us through grace.

How many times are we held back because we’re not good enough either? How many days are we discouraged because we don’t realize the extent of God’s grace? I’m not a perfect wife, but I cling to the verse in Proverbs 12:4, “A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband.” With joy I’m reminded that I’d rather be a crown than a trophy wife, and that I’d rather have virtue than vogue. Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. – Proverbs 31:10 You’re so much more than just another pretty face; you’re deeply loved by a God Who numbers your hair. The same God who painted spots on ladybugs' backs, and lights up our skies with fireflies created you, redeemed you, and knows you by name. Have you surrendered your life to the Lord? Here’s merely a glimpse of who we become through His grace: