Divine grace is God acting in our life to accomplish what we cannot do on our own. It informs our being and actions and makes them effective in the wisdom and power of God. Hence, grace is not opposed to effort (our actions) but to earning (our attitude).

We must stop using the fact that we cannot earn grace ( whether for justification or for sanctification) as an excuse for not energetically seeking to receive grace.

Job's journey of faith moved from ritual to relationship. He began with what we may call the faith of propriety, moved through the faith of desperation, and finally arrived at the faith of sufficiency—the faith that says, regardless of what happens, "It doesn't matter. I have God, and that is all I need.

Emergencies are opportunities to bring God into the realities of your life.

And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed" (2 Corinthians 9:8).

When it comes to experiencing the sufficiency of God, we are not talking about what God can do; we are talking about what we need to do. And what we need to do is to turn our minds to God.

Content with beholding His face, My all to His pleasure resigned; No changes of season or place Would make any change in my mind; While blessed with a sense of his love, A palace a toy would appear; And prisons would palaces prove, If Jesus would dwell with me there.

Satan's constant assault is aimed at our belief in God's goodness and power, that God will supply all our needs, and that we can trust God to be sufficient in all ways. When our minds are on God, and our thoughts are formed by our knowledge of God, such sufficiency will flow to us. Thus Satan's main task is to keep our minds elsewhere, anywhere but on God.

They then easily moved on to the faith-destroying, even blasphemous idea that everything that happens in this world is caused by God.

If a law had been given capable of bringing people to life," Paul said, "then righteousness would have come from that law" (Gal. 3:21). But law, for all its magnificence, cannot do that. Graceful relationship sustained with the masterful Christ certainly can.

Hope lies in having more faith in the power of God to heal us than in the power of anything to hurt or destroy us. In realizing that as children of God we are bigger than our problems, we have the power at last to confront them.

I have self-doubt. I have insecurity. I have fear of failure. I have nights when I show up at the arena and I'm like, 'My back hurts, my feet hurt, my knees hurt. I don't have it. I just want to chill.' We all have self-doubt. You don't deny it, but you also don't capitulate to it. You embrace it.