Sin is not just a matter of bad behavior. It is a condition of the heart. That's why you cannot free yourself from it.

When amazing realities of the gospel quit commanding your attention, your awe, and your worship, other things in your life will capture your attention instead. When you quit celebrating grace, you begin to forget how much you need grace, and when you forget how much you need grace, you quit seeking the rescue and strength that only grace can give. This means you begin to see yourself as more righteous, strong, and wise than you actually are, and in so doing, you set yourself up for trouble.

The person next to you doesn't need the gospel more than you do; he just needs it differently than you do. All people sin and fall short.

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.

The church is a community of unfinished people living in a broken world and still in need of God's forgiving and transforming grace. The church isn't meant, for either leaders or those being led, to be comfortable; it's meant to be personally transformational.

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.

You deal with others with grace when you walk around with the humble realization of how deep your need for grace was and continues to be.

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.

It's a tragedy when we praise God for his grace on Sunday and deny our need for that grace the rest of the week. Face

You and I need to say it to ourselves again and again. We need to look in the mirror and make the confession as part of our morning routine. Here's what we all need to say: "I am not a grace graduate.