So your trials are not a sign that God has forgotten you or is being unfaithful to his promises. Rather, they stand as a reminder that he is committed to his grace and will not forsake it—it will complete its work.

Self-reliance is a lie that leads you nowhere good. You do not have what you need inside yourself to live as you were created to live. So a God of tender grace comes to you in the person of his Son and offers you everything you need for life and godliness. In grace, he is ever with you because he knows you'll never make it on your own.

Dependency means living, as a leader, as if I really do believe that my walk with God is a community project. It means that because of the blinding power of remaining sin, I give up on the belief that no one knows me better than I know myself. Dependency means no longer being afraid of exposure, because I really do believe that there is nothing that could be known, exposed, or revealed about me that has not already been addressed by the person and work of Jesus.

Because accepting blame is not natural, it takes rescuing, transforming grace to produce a humble, willing, broken, self-examining, help-seeking heart. Only divine grace can soften a person's heart. Only grace can help your eyes to see what you need to see. Only grace can decimate your defenses and lead you to confess. Only grace can cause you to quit pointing your finger and to run to your Redeemer for his forgiveness and delivering power.

There is hope for your relationships; there are resources for the struggle, because you have inherited big, expansive, powerful, rescuing, and transforming grace. This grace is so huge and powerful that there is no way to wrap human words around it.

If you mourn the fallenness of your world rather than curse its difficulties, you know that grace has visited you.

So your weaknesses are not the big danger that you should fear. What you should really fear are your delusions of strength. When you tell yourself that you are strong, you quit being excited about God's rescuing, transforming, and empowering grace.

Healthy ministry communities, which leave a legacy of long-term gospel productivity, have longevity and fruit because they are, at their core, communities of grace. Rather than achievement forming how the leadership community forms itself and operates, the gospel does.

Seeing yourself as hopeless and helpless if left to yourself initiates and ignites your pursuit of God's grace.

There is a God of awesome grace who meets his children in moments of darkness and difficulty. He is worth running to. He is worth waiting for. He brings rest when it seems like there is no rest to be found.

the Bible is not a collection of stories, but one big story with lots of chapters. It is the story of how God meets weak and failing people with his powerful grace.

Your life is not good because it is easy or predictable, but because the I Am has invaded your existence by his grace.