We don't often take time to sit and meditate on what our lives would've been like if the mercy of the Redeemer had not been written into our personal stories.

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.

We don't obey to get his favor; we obey because his favor has fallen on us and transformed our hearts, giving us the willingness and power to obey.

Faith comes to you as God's gift of grace: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God" (Eph. 2:8). Not only is your salvation a gift of God, but the faith to embrace it is his gift as well. But here is

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.

God didn't give us his grace in order to make our little claustrophobic kingdoms of one work, but to invite us to a much, much better kingdom.

There is grace for our fickle and easily distracted hearts.

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.

need grace, and when you forget how much you need grace, you quit seeking the rescue and strength that only grace can give.

Paul is saying that we do the right that we do because grace is at that moment rescuing us from ourselves. Grace is protecting us from the self-righteousness and self-sovereignty that would make us all too independent and all too rebellious. Every moment of our obedience is an evidence of and a celebration of the grace that not only forgives but rescues, and not only rescues but transforms. We live in God's sight not in our own strength, but only by grace.

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.