God is going to reveal me as a flawed human being as fast as he can and he's going to enjoy it because it will force me to grapple with real intimacy.

Look, you guys are running around like monkeys trying to get people to clap, but people are fallen, they are separated from God, so they have no idea what is good or bad, worthy to be judged or set free, beautiful or ugly to begin with. Why not get your glory from God? Why not accept your feelings of redemption because of His pleasure in you, not the fickle and empty favor of man? And only then will you know who you are.

Perhaps if we stop reducing the text to formulas for personal growth, we can read it as stories of imperfect humans having relations with a perfect God and come to understand the obvious message He is communicating to mankind.

If I was going to make Betsy happy, I'd have to trust that my flaws were the ways through which I would receive grace. We don't think of our flaws as the glue that binds us to the people we love, but they are. Grace only sticks to our imperfections. Those who can't accept their imperfections can't accept grace either.

The sin of David stands out like a tar-baby in a field of snow, like a blackberry in a bowl of cream. It may cause us to miss the greatness of the man. Remember that sin was the exception in David's life—not the pattern of it. The Word of God does not play down the sin of David; it does not whitewash the man. God doesn't say it is not sin. God is going to call it sin, and David will be punished for it.

Believe me, David had a checkered career. This is the reason he suffered—he let sin enter his life. But above it all was a faith in God that never failed. He wanted more than all else to have a wonderful relationship with God.

He sins because he is a sinner. Fundamentally, on the inside, man is a sinner, and that accounts for his actions. I am sure that many people in that day said of the Assyrians,

My friend, after you have been saved, God is going to talk to you about good works. Until that time, God is not even interested in your 'good works' because what you call a good work, God calls dirty laundry. The righteousness of man is filthy rags in His sight (Isaiah 64:6). He doesn't want any of that. He wants to save you.

Be very sure of this,-people never reject the Bible because they cannot understand it. They understand it only too well; they understand that it condemns their own behavior; they understand that it witnesses against their own sins, and summons them to judgment.

Sin, in short, is that vast moral disease which affects the whole human race, of every rank and class and name and nation and people and tongue, a disease from which there never was but one born of woman that was free. Need I say that One was Christ Jesus the Lord?

Without thorough conviction of sin, people may seem to come to Jesus and follow Him for a little while, but they will soon fall away and return to the world.

nothing will ever allow them to find rest except submission to the old doctrines of man's ruin and Christ's redemption — and simple childlike faith in Jesus.