Like a precious family heirloom, freedom is not just ours to enjoy, but to treasure, protect, and pass on to future generations.

How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

It's been hard. Easier was the wrong word. There's nothing easy about freedom. You have to strive. You have to make a plan and stick to it.

now the Spirit had come, and Mark's account of the baptism makes it abundantly clear that he sees Jesus as the Messianic Son and the Suffering Servant, equipped for his stupendous task with the Spirit of God promised for the end-time. The last days are no longer entirely in the future; in the person of Jesus the end has dawned.

Deliverance is not the same as freedom. Deliverance is release from the oppressor, but freedom is deliverance from oppression.

There is truly no greater burden than freedom, no heavier load than liberty.

Our task, as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to the world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to the world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to the world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to the world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion.

To hope for a better future in this world—for the poor, the sick, the lonely and depressed, for the slaves, the refugees, the hungry and homeless, for the abused, the paranoid, the downtrodden and despairing, and in fact for the whole wide, wonderful, and wounded world—is not something else, something extra, something tacked on to the gospel as an afterthought.

Art is love creating new worlds; justice is love rolling up its sleeves to heal the old one.

has happened before—literally, with the ending of the slave trade and the subsequent freeing of the slaves—and it needs to happen again. And happen it will, because the victory of the cross is real, and the power of the Spirit to implement that victory is real as well.

You cannot rescue someone from the scars of an abusive upbringing by replaying the same narrative on a cosmic scale and mouthing the word "love" as you do so.