If you're God's child, you will never again have just you to depend on. No, you've been blessed, right here, right now, with grace.

If you aren't daily admitting to yourself that you are a mess and in daily and rather desperate need for forgiving and transforming grace, and if the evidence around has not caused you to abandon your confidence in your own righteousness, then you are going to give yourself to the work of convincing yourself that you are okay.

God justifies the ungodly. This means there really is hope for people like us.

False religion does not need a Savior. False religion is rooted in human righteousness. Rather than being broken, needy, poor in spirit, crying out for divine rescue, it comforts itself in evidences of its own righteousness.

Faith is a deep-seated belief in the existence of God that radically alters the way you live your life. Now, here's the rub. Faith isn't natural for us. Biblical faith is counterintuitive and countercultural. So we even need God's grace to have faith to believe in the existence of the One whose grace we so desperately need. And the grace is yours for the asking again today.

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.

We must always, always, remember that the theology of the Word of God is not an end in itself but a means to an end, and that end is a radically grace-transformed

The person who is comfortable in his own righteousness hasn't really understood grace, and the person who is unimpressed by God's grace hasn't really understood his sin. So

A joyful life of grace toward others grows best in the soil of gratitude. When I really reflect on who I am, when I take time to consider the grace that I couldn't have earned, achieved, or deserved but which has been lavished on me, and when I remember that that grace came at the cost of the life of another, then I am joyfully motivated to give that grace to others.

God is holy, but we're not. Jesus became our righteousness so that we can stand before God, holy in him.

the theology of the Word of God is not an end in itself but a means to an end, and that end is a radically grace-transformed life.

God, who loves us enough to sacrifice his Son for our redemption, works so that we would see ourselves clearly, so that we would not buy into the delusion of our own righteousness, and so that with a humble sense of personal need we would seek the resources of grace that can only be found in him.