Make this the year you stop complaining about your weaknesses, and instead search for their God-given purpose.

Only the gospel can do two seemingly contradictory things: destroy pride and increase courage. Destroy self-exaltation and increase confidence. Destroy the pushiness of self-assertion and deliver from the paralysis of self-doubt.

God responds to prayer because when we look away from ourselves to Christ as our only hope, that gives the Father an occasion to magnify the glory of his grace in the all-providing work of his Son. Similarly, fasting is peculiarly suited to glorify God in this way. It is fundamentally an offering of emptiness to God in hope.

Father, I am empty, but you are full. I am hungry, but you are the Bread of Heaven. I am thirsty, but you are the Fountain of Life. I am weak, but you are strong. I am poor, but you are rich. I am foolish, but you are wise. I am broken, but you are whole. I am dying, but your steadfast love is better than life" (see Psalm63:3). When God sees this confession of need and this expression of trust, he acts, because the glory of his all-sufficient grace is at stake.

In the first case, we use our own power to make ourselves moral. In the second case, we use our own power to make the church moral. In the first case, we fail to rely on the power of God for our own sanctification. In the second case, we fail to rely on the power of God for the sanctification of others.

In other words, the path to glory for God's incarnate representative on earth was the path through suffering. The path to majesty was through meekness. The path to exaltation was through humility. The path to power was through weakness.

what we need from the Bible is not the fulfillment of our dream, but the swallowing up of our failed dream in the all-satisfying glory of Christ.

To the world the gospel doesn't look like power at all. It looks like weakness—asking people to be like children and telling them to depend on Jesus, instead of standing on their own two feet. But for those who believe, it is the power of God to give sinners everlasting glory.

When we look back to the death and resurrection of Christ, God shows us in the present the enormity of his love for us, and thus warrants all our confidence in future grace. "God shows [present] his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died [past] for us" (Romans 5:8). Without the death of Christ, there would be no future grace.

It is crucial that we realize that grace in Paul's vocabulary is not just a divine disposition to pardon sin. It is also a divine power to work in us all that God requires from us.

The coronavirus calls us to make God the all-important, pervasive reality in our lives. Our lives depend on him more than they depend on breath. And sometimes God takes our breath in order to throw us onto himself.

I suppose it will not be denied by any, that God, in glorifying the saints in heaven with eternal felicity, aims to satisfy his infinite grace or benevolence, by the bestowment of a good [which is] infinitely valuable, because eternal: and yet there never will come the moment, when it can be said, that now this infinitely valuable good has been actually bestowed.