As much as we can, let's defend the truth by pointing to what the apostles taught, and let's call out sin by pointing to the inconsistencies between what we say we believe and what we do.
I have tried to devote my life - with all my husband failures, father failures, pastor failures, friend failures, any other possible failures I'm sure I've done them - to the God-centeredness of God and my aspiring, yearning to join Him in that activity. God is passionate about hallowing the name of God.
Woe to us if we get our satisfaction from the food in the kitchen and the TV in the den and the sex in the bedroom with an occasional tribute to the cement blocks in the basement!
God is not beholden to us at all. He doesn't owe us anything.
Darkness comes. In the middle of it, the future looks blank. The temptation to quit is huge. Don't. You are in good company... You will argue with yourself that there is no way forward. But with God, nothing is impossible. He has more ropes and ladders and tunnels out of pits than you can conceive. Wait. Pray without ceasing. Hope.
Jesus Christ... came into the world to vindicate the infinite worth of God's holiness which had been desecrated by our sin and which seemed... to be taken lightly because it was being passed over for nothing more than the blood of bulls.
Homosexual behavior has been exploited, and reveled in, and celebrated in art, for millennia.
God wills to be displayed and known and loved and cherished and worshiped.
God has levels of willing and delighting. He wills and delights in things in different ways so that approval and disapproval can coexist without being contradictory, without canceling each other out. I am making the case here for infinite complexity.
Whenever the strength of God is not recognized as the source of our strength, we are breaking the First Commandment: Do not have any gods before me.
When I believe in Jesus, I am united to Christ. Therefore, what he did and achieved becomes mine by this union through faith alone. His righteous life is imputed to me. What Christ achieved is counted as mine.
My prayer is that the good news of Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, would flood Jewish communities around the world, that the veil would be lifted, and that we would see a massive turning of Israel to the Lord Jesus.
Few things give rise to imprecise rhetoric like the issue of race. It's understandable, but damaging.
The most dangerous thing in the world is the sin of self-reliance and the stupor of worldliness.
As a child and a teenager, my attitudes and actions assumed the superiority of my race in almost every way without knowing or wanting to know anybody who was black, except Lucy. Lucy came to our house on Saturdays to help my mother clean. I liked Lucy, but the whole structure of the relationship was demeaning.
The saving love of God is his doing whatever must be done, at great cost to himself, and for the least deserving, so that he might enthrall them with what will make them supremely happy forever, namely, himself.
Not all single women want to be married. Not all boys like football. Not all homemakers like to cook. Not all messy people are lazy. And not all the obese are gluttons. There are glands and diabetes and a dozen conditions you never heard of that may account for things. Put your sermon through the counter-stereotype sieve.
We are all responsible to Jesus first, and then, under him, to various other persons and offices. Discerning the path of love and obedience when two or more of these submissive relationships collide is a call to humble, Bible-saturated, spiritual wisdom.
The Bible is the ultimate authority and infallible, not the pastor and not the elders. And it doesn't mean that you believe everything he says without examining it.
The bloodline of Jesus is thicker, deeper, stronger than the bloodline of race, ethnicity and family.
