Lord, please crush my heart with the guilt of my sin so that you may fill it once again with the glory of your redeeming grace.

It really is possible to live in a state of Advent schizophrenia, where you celebrate the birth of the Messiah while actively denying your need for his birth, life, death, and resurrection.

Here's how confession works. You cannot confess what you haven't grieved, you can't grieve what you do not see, and you cannot repent of what you have not confessed. So one of the most important operations of God's grace is to give us eyes to see our sin and hearts that are willing to confess it.

The more you see your sin, the more you will respond tenderly to other sinners and want for them the same grace you have received. And as you taste new life, you will begin to celebrate, in fresh new ways, the grace that is yours in Christ Jesus.

You cannot ask for forgiveness without acknowledging that there is something in life that is more important than the progress of your own kingdom.

You don't have to worry about whether your wrongs will be forgiven and your weaknesses greeted with patience and grace. You don't have to worry, because you have a Savior who has invaded your life with his grace and has made you the place where he dwells.

Since nothing we intend is ever faultless, and nothing we attempt ever without error, and nothing we achieve without some measure of finitude and fallibility we call humanness, we are saved by forgiveness. DAVID AUGSBURGER

sin kidnapped our worship, and grace works to restore it to its rightful owner—God. It is only when God is in his rightful place in our hearts that everything else is in its appropriate place in our lives, and only powerful grace can accomplish this.

No, the message is that God puts an uncompromising standard before us, then sends his Son to perfectly meet that standard on our behalf, so that we can be free to admit our failures and go to God for help. The cross of Jesus Christ means I don't have to deny my struggle as a parent, I don't have to act as if I'm something that I'm not, and I surely don't have to hide from the only One who is able to help me.

God knew that we would convince ourselves that we are okay when we're not okay. So he designed a means for us to be confronted again and again with the depth of our sin and the expansive glory of his provision in the person and work of the Lamb, the Savior, the Redeemer—the Lord Jesus Christ.

Yet the message of the garden of Eden is that sin makes us quest for God's position. We want life to work according to our will and conform to our plan. This desire to be at the center never goes anywhere good, personally or relationally. Self-centeredness is at the core of sin's dysfunction, another powerful evidence of our need for rescuing grace.

Humility means the willingness to look in the mirror of God's Word and being glad that whatever we see there has already been covered by the blood of Jesus.